If you are using a third party administrative (TPA) service to issue payments and track down former employees, you will need to export the information from the Safe Harbor payment detail files to provide the needed information to the TPA.
This post will cover two different scenarios. In the first scenario, you will be providing the employee information, payment amount and PDF copies of the statement to your TPA. The TPA will issue the payments and include a copy of your statement with the payment. You will need to provide the TPA with a file that contains the employee information (name, address, S.S. #, payment amount) and copies of the individual statements in PDF format.
In the second scenario, the TPA will generate the statement and issue the payment. In this scenario, the TPA will need more information that just the employee information and payment amount to create a statement required by AB 1513. The TPA will require the information for each pay period that needs to be included on the statement. This will require exporting two separate files. The first will include employee details (name, address, S.S. #, payment amount, etc.) and the second will include the pay period detail for all employees.
Before continuing make sure that you have updated to version 7.77.1619 or higher. Starting this with version, the program update included export definition files that you can use to include all of the columns in our standard export formats.
Workflow
Create Checks
In either scenario, the first step is to use the Create Safe Harbor Checks option to calculate the Safe Harbor payment totals. Since you won’t actually be issuing the checks yourself, select the Final-Update Employees option as shown below:
The Create Checks option will generate the report showing the total gross wages for each employee as well as the tax deductions. Only the gross wages amount will be sent to the TPA; it will be their responsibility to calculate and deduct all appropriate payroll taxes.
Make a note and/or print at least the last page of the report that contains the total safe harbor payments that will be made.
If, at this point, you just need to give your TPA a list of employees, but are not ready to issue the payments, then you still need to use the Create Checks option to calculate the preliminary payment amounts. You can skip the next step however, and go right to the Exporting Employee Data step. The statements do not need to be generated just to create a list of the employees that will be getting safe harbor payments.
Export or Create Safe Harbor Statements
Next you will use the Print Safe Harbor Statement option to either create PDF copies of the employee statements or export the statement data to an Excel spreadsheet:
If you want to export the statement data to Excel, enter a filename to save the information to, then click on the Customize Export… button to select the columns to include in the spreadsheet. The first time you do this, you will need to import an export definition file. Which file you import will depend on how your payment totals are calculated. If you are doing an aggregate calculation (as specified in the law) then you will import the “Standard AB 1513 Statement Export” definition. If you are using a per pay period calculation, then you will import the “Detailed AB 1513 Statement Export” file.
Note: Both of these files will be installed in your report definitions folder automatically if as long as you are running version 7.77.1619 or higher.
To import the definition file, right-click on a blank area of the Customize Report Settings window to get the popup menu. Select the Import Report Settings option from the popup menu:
Select the file that you want to import, and the settings for that definition will be loaded. Note: The definition file only needs to be imported one time. Once it has been imported, if you need to export the statement data again, you can click on the lookup button on the Title to load the settings.
If you will be providing your TPA with the actual statements themselves, then you do not need to export any data using this option. What you will do instead is check the Generate Individual PDF Statements box to create the PDF copies of the statements that you can compress in a ZIP file and send to the TPA. By default, the program will create an individual file for each employee using the account number as the filename. We recommend keeping this naming method because it will make it straightforward for the TPA to identify the correct statement file that needs to go to each employee.
Note that you can export the statement detail data and create the PDF files at the same time if you want. Normally you should only need to one or the other.
Click on the Preview button to start the export and/or create the PDF files. The spreadsheet will automatically be opened once you are done. We recommend that you double check the total payment amounts by adding a SUM function at the bottom of the spreadsheet. This number should match the gross safe harbor payments from the Create Checks process. Once you have submitted the file to your TPA, make sure that they confirm the same number. If the total safe harbor payments at any point do not match, you should investigate the discrepancy before allowing safe harbor payments to go forward.
Note: During the statement printing process, the program performs a separate calculation on the safe harbor payment amount and compares this to the result of the calculation during the Create Checks process. If there is a difference, an error message will be displayed. This could be due to a rounding difference between the two calculations, selecting different options on the Apply Limts option, or a program bug. If you get an error about the amounts not matching, contact Datatech to investigate further before sending any payment data to your TPA.
Exporting Employee Data
Next you will export the employee name/address/SSN/payment amount information using the Export/Print Mailing Labels option. For the label type, select Export Only. Enter the filename that you want to the information to be exported to. We recommend placing this in the same folder as the statement detail file or the PDF files (depending of course on which files you are sending to your TPA).
Click on the Customize… button. As with the statement, you will need to import the export definition file the first time that you do the export. Right click to get the popup menu on the Customize Report Settings window and select the “Standard AB 1513 Employee Export” definition file.
If you are sending your information to Simpluris, we have a different definition file to use that was not included in the update. Click here to download the Simpluris Export Definition. Save the file in the Winfarm/Definitions or Winlco/Definitions folder with the other report definitions, or save it on your desktop and navigate to your desktop when you use the Import Report Settings option.
Click on the Export button to start the export process.
Almost Done!
At this point, you will have calculated the Safe Harbor payment totals, exported the statements to either PDF or Excel files, and exported the employee details and total payment information to an Excel file.
Check with your TPA about the preferred method for sending the files to them. Some may use FTP and others may have a secure file upload service that you can use. If you are sending PDF statement copies, you may want to compress all of the PDF files into a single ZIP file. This can be done in Windows by right clicking on the folder that contains the files and selecting the Send To -> Compressed file option:
This ZIP file can then be uploaded to your TPA.
If you are just sending a list of employees right now, you should be able to simply upload the Excel file containing the employee data.