Administration, Core Financials, and Project Accounting

[Ralph]

Business software publishers are obviously dependent on information from the IRS when it comes to publishing software to handle 1099 tax form processing.  At least one of the relevant IRS publications (1220) was published in September this year.  There may have been other information that the software publishers needed from the IRS that did not become available until even later.  I don't know.

Sage made the MAS 500 2011 1099 standalone update available to their customers this week.  As usual, the 1099 standalone update is a minor update and does not require full-scale MAS 500 testing by MAS 500 customers prior to installation.  The issue I have with the 1099 update is that it requires the March 2011 PU as a pre-req.  We are currently on the December 2010 PU, since I have been waiting for the PU containing SMI reporting trees, originally slated for this month, but now pushed out to next spring.  Once Sage releases a PU with SMI reporting trees, I will have to wait another couple of months for the publisher of the 3rd-party add-on that we use to release a compatible version of their product, which means I am looking at next summer before I can update our system.

This means that I will not be able to install the 1099 update that was released this week until next summer.  That presents a slight problem, since 1099s need to go out next month. 

I realize that information needed from the government often does not become available until late in the year, and therefore the usual December availability date for the 1099 update is unavoidable.  But rather than making a 9-month-old PU the pre-req, is there anything that could possibly be done so that the pre-req for installing it is simply any currently supported version of MAS?  There are probably a lot of MAS customers who do not update their system every year, and who therefore may be in the same situation I am in, which is basically up a creek with regard to the 2011 1099 update.

[LouDavis]

I would think any 1099 update would be data related most of the time instead of changes on how 1099's are created, so I agree with you Ralph that it makes sense to not tie this update to any specific update to the version of MAS 500 you are using.  The only check I would recommend is that you don't try to install an older 1099 update over a current one to avoid issues.  However, if for some chance there are changes to the functionality on how 1099's are generated, then that would require a specific MAS 500 update.

[DGill]

Ralph,

Did not even see your posting until I searched the board for '1099' because I found out what you are describing just a few minutes ago. I was trying to be proactive and get my one client updated who needs to print 1099s. We will be upgrading to 7.4 but won't be starting until the new year and no way will we have it done prior to the AP department needing to send these out.  I'm on version 7.30.2, we were unable to update to the latest update last Jan as we like to do.

Need some timely Sage feedback on this one. Is it truly not compatible with any 7.3 install prior to the March 2011 update or is that just because no one did any regression testing prior to that version?

I thought one of the goals of separating out the 1099 update a few years ago was to give customers freedom to keep current with the 1099 forms even if they are behind on that version's service packs.

[Ralph]

Well that'll teach you to try to be proactive, Dan. 

[Ralph]

But in all seriousness, I'm thinking this 1099 update will be useless to most companies.  Unless they have updated within the last six months, they won't be able to use it.  I doubt many companies are going to be updating in the next few weeks given that it's year-end processing time for most folks.

[LouDavis]

I would highly recommend due to the time constraints that you open a case with support to get a definitve answer to this question and what possible work arounds there might be.

[Ralph]

I spoke with Sage Support about this and was told that Sage 500 ERP will not even allow 2011 1099s to be processed unless the December 2011 PU or 1099 update has been applied.  Apparently it will display a message indicating this, and will not allow the task to continue.   I was not aware of this because I have never had a reason to try it, until now.  Their recommendation for a workaround is to apply the v7.3 December 2011 PU to our test/development system and process the 1099s on it.

EDIT:  I actually gave this a try on a v7.3 December 2010 (7.30.5) test system because I wanted to see exactly what the message said, and as it turns out I was able to print a 2011 1099-MISC form for one of our vendors without any problem.  I am checking with the analyst to find out what the story is.