Peachtree Issues Solved

Peachtree is a fabulous program, but one whose twists and turns can be difficult to learn! Thankfully there is a fabulous user community supported by a strong backbone of Peachtree Accounting certified consultants; today we trawl through some of the problems that users have had in July to hopefully help you get your small business accounting software working for you again.

Adding unusual pay amounts

Not every employee and every job fits neatly under hourly or overtime pay. If you pay commissions to your staff, or want to make one-off payments in Peachtree Complete, you can do the following:

• Define a field under the employee tab of the Payroll defaults
• Or, click Payroll Setup in Peachtree 2009
• Label the new field Misc. Income
• Input the tax levels and click the Adjust button

Surcharges for particular items

If you have a particular inventory set that needs a 15% surcharge, you can use the Inventory Price Levels feature to list the higher prices, and tehn set the company to use the higher level as the default.

Locations going to default

Some users are wanting to set up new locations, and have the payroll, wages and taxes default to the original company location. Unfortunately you cannot set defaults by department or by location; however you can manually set the GL accounts in the Maintain>Employees menu. Make sure you uncheck the 'Use Defaults' box.

Printing the wrong check numbers

One common (but slightly tricky) mistake this month has been putting checks in the printer in the wrong order. You can correct this in Peachtree by:

• Pulling up the first check in the payment list, and renaming it 0001X.
• Pulling up the second check, and changing it to the first check's number
• Pulling up the first check, and changing it to the second check's number!

Print preview for payroll not working

If the Print Preview feature for payroll reports isn't displaying, you'll need to click on the black arrow to the right of the Print icon once the payroll has been calculated. Select Report instead of Preview, and you'll get a pre-check register.

Health insurance allowance as an additional income amount

For employees that get a health insurance allowance (usually because they are on their spouse's insurance), you can set this up in Peachtree Quantum by going into Maintain> Default Information> Employees> Employee Fields tab and adding an additional line. Label the field name and set the appropriate GL expense account - however don't check off the CALC column, and do leave the formula field blank. Click on the Tax formula line and then hit the Adjust button.