First paycheck fun!
*whistle*
Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, there were two geeks that decided to start a company. Well, these two little geeks thought they were smart, what can I say? Anyhow, the Big Day finally rolls around. You know the one.. FIRST PAY DAY! They figured it’d take them an hour or so, then they’d go see superman. Oh ho HO! Little did they know… Enter that crafty guy, Uncle Sam.
So we’re using quickbooks online ( slick in some ways, painful in others ). We wisely opted for the payroll module to help us calculate taxes. Sadly, it does not “do it all”. Indeed, all it really does is multiply two numbers and say “you owe this much”. Even better - to *get* to the multiplication point on unemployment taxes, we had to apply for an unemployment tax id. But.. To get the tax id, you have to pay your first payroll.. To do the payroll, you need the tax id.. Wait a minute..
Looking more closely, we realized that what the state actually wanted to find out was whether or not you were liable for unemployment taxes yet. You have to have a working employee at least 20 different weeks in the calendar year or have paid an employee over $1500 in wages for a quarter. What complicated silliness! Anyhow, we definitely qualified, so we went through about a million pages of questions, some repeating, and some extremely confusing. Apparently, our incantations resonated with some unholy bell and we received that coveted Unemployment Tax Id.
Now we can get back to cutting a paycheck! Much more pleasant! Well, it was until we saw the amounts that *weren’t* going into our pockets. *sigh* Ah, well.. Nothing much you can do about that. Quickbooks did it’s multiplication and we have our numbers that we owe each taxing authority. Back to the unemployment website!
This trip wasn’t as painful - enter some account numbers, say how much we think we owe, and watch it go bye-bye. Done! One more to do - US Treasury..
For an enjoyable trip down memory lane circa 1997, check out the design on the official online payment system website for the IRS: EFTPS. After recovering from the physical and psychological damages afflicted by this site design, we entered our information and were told “sorry, you actually can’t make any payments online yet, because we have to send you a secret code through snail mail [ostensibly] for security reasons”. Man, what a ripoff! 
Well, to sum up a long, probably boring story, after about three hours of work, we finally got our first paycheck cut! That’s right! One paycheck! And we’re still not done, because we’re waiting for our super-duper ultra-secret code which will unlock the secrets of life, errr, online tax payments.
Anyhow, I’d just like to thank all of the great minds that came up with all this complicated silliness. Rick has a screenshot of how you figure out if that 20-week thing applies to you.. It’s fantastic! Until next time…