Thoughts From The Passenger Seat

I handle the accounting and payroll for a company, which means governmental reports, and lots of them.

The quarterly ones are not so bad because at least I do them four times a year. However, there is usually a notification to change my password. 15 characters! One capital letter! One Number! One symbol but only #@& or *! You cannot use any part of your previous five passwords! Get the picture?

I can do the majority of quarterly reports through Quickbooks, but my state decided that SOME reports, you have to go through their website. Notice I said SOME.

But don’t worry, I have a checklist for every report with the website I need to process the report correctly. I’ve been doing this too long to not have step by step instructions!

Now, let’s talk about the annual reports. Once a year. I’m talking specifically about the ACA Proof of Health Insurance or 1065-B report. Wait, I stand corrected. Per the IRS it’s a “1065-B document”. This is something I have to do because we are a self-funded small business but I don’t have to do any of the “funding” like a typical self-funded group. I pay a flat monthly rate for each employee and based on the medical expenses for the year, sometimes I get money back after the year end, and sometimes I don’t. I’m fortunate that the majority of the work is done by my carrier to Mineral that sends on the reports to the IRS. I just print them and give them to my employees on the plan. The problem is, in the email Mineral sends to tell me about it, they don’t say, “go here, here and here”. No, I go to the website, to the ACA Hub, and am confronted with a list of “resources”. Do I need to upload my employees information to this excel spreadsheet? I thought I did….

After a short time of frustration, I called the Help Center. The person took all my information to pass me on to another person. That person was very helpful. “No, you don’t have to upload the information, you click here, instead of here (right next to the first “here”). I made her stay on the line until I was 95% completed. She showed me where the step by step instructions were (why wasn’t that in an email to ALL self-funded small businesses?). She told me I could take a training class and my reply was, “I do this once a year for six employees”. I was polite, I promise! Her parting words were, “all that will be left is closing out the tax year”. Hmmm, what does that mean? I go through the report, and there is “close out the tax year”. I click on it, click on finish, nothing, nothing, nothing. I go back through the step by step, oh, I have to wait until it’s accepted….

The report is done (notice I refuse to say “document), and I will have weekly notices to remind myself to go back into the report, and through the steps to get to the last bit to “close out the tax year”. I could have typed the information into a template six times, checked, printed them, and mailed them off to the IRS and my employees faster than it took me to do the report. I will print out that resource for next year.

The report isn’t due until somewhere around the end of February so I am grateful I didn’t wait until the last week to start the report!

Now, on to the 1099s and more of the same!