Issue/Symptom/Question

With the new legislative order (CARES act section 2302) passed Friday, March 27, 2020 employers can now defer the FICA employer match (6.2%) for the remainder of 2020 with 50% being payable by 12/31/21 and 50% being payable by 12/31/22. Please note that the funds will still be due to the government, the payment date is just getting pushed back.
Does Penta provides the option to apply the Employer portion of FICA to a different vendor ID or GL account?

Applies To

Payroll > Legal Entity Information >US Payroll Accrual/Expense Accounts
Accounts Payable > Invoices > Invoice & Credit Memo entry
Finance & Accounting > Data Entry > Journal Entries > Journal Entry

Covid-19, Coronavirus, CARES Act

Resolution/Fix/Answer

Although there is currently no automatic setting to separate employee and employer FICA accrual transactions through payroll, there are reports that can give you the information needed in order to manually move the employer portion of the FICA accrual to a separate account for reporting purposes.  

The Payroll Register Major Summary report (PRCHKSMY) can be run each month (using the Begin Date and End Date of the payroll checks to be included in each report), which will give you the period totals for both employee and employer accruals for FICA.  

From this report, you can create a General Journal Entry (if the accrual account is a non-edit rule account), or an AP Invoice Entry if the accrual accounts are AP edit-rule accounts. 

• The Journal Entry needed will be a positive entry to the FICA Accrual Account identified per OU or Pay Group in the LE Accrual/Expense account setup screen and an offsetting negative entry to the new Employer FICA account set up for this purpose.  One record for the credit, one record for the debit, resulting in a balanced journal entry.
• The AP Invoice entry necessary when the FICA accrual account is an AP edit rule account, will be a zero invoice amount to the OU/Vendor/Invoice created by the payroll entry, and 2 Account Distribution records:
  • A negative amount to a wash account selected by you to use for the AP account move, and an offset to the original AP Account# listed at the bottom of this tab 
  • A positive amount to the same wash account as the previous record, with an offset entry to the new GL AP Account created for the employer portion of the FICA accrual.  
    • This will reduce the original AP account by the employer portion of the FICA amount calculated by the payroll process, and will move this amount to the new AP account created for the 2020 FICA reporting.  

When paying this invoice, you would query and use the SSA vendor and the new GL account in the Select Items for Payment screen.  

Example: