I have been using Quickbooks for more than 10 years to track our small business accounting. I’ve never minded upgrading. I’ve been completely happy with the company and the program. But sometime in the past year one of the automatic updates removed my ability to print W-2 forms without subscribing to their payroll service. Last year I could print them. This year I can’t. The payroll service costs over $200 per year. This is reasonable for a company with many employees. It is ridiculously high for our little business with only one employee. Now I am suddenly aware that those automatic updates can break my accounting systems. I can’t figure out how to turn them off. And there is no way to back track and undo the update that removed this vital capability.
So I guess tomorrow will begin with an unpleasant phone call to Quickbooks to complain.
Edit 1/20/08: In the end I just subscribed to the payroll service. I could have messed with doing W-2 forms by hand, but it would have cost me hours. I saved 3 hours on the W-2 forms alone. I’ll also save an hour or two each quarter working with the quarterly reports. I’ll also save 30 minutes each month on paychecks. Add it all up thats 15 hours per year I’ll save. Since my time is worth at least $15 per hour, the payroll service is worth the expense. I’ve also realized the reasons why they require subscriptions. If they included the forms in the software, then people would be using those exact forms for the next 10 years even though tax forms change from year to year.
Where did you get it originally? I always keep update install files and the original install files, and obviously the install discs.
I don’t let anything auto-update except the anit-virus and the firewall software. everything esle has updates turned off or manual.
If you have all the numbers for the W-2, and simply can’t print it, you could just get a blank form and type them in. That’s not reasonable for many employees, but for just one it’s not so bad.
Having said that, I would still complain to the company. No update should remove functionality.
Theoretically, at least with QB Pro 2006:
Go to the Help menu and click Update QuickBooks. The Update QuickBooks window appears.
Click the Options tab.
For the Automatic Update option, select No.
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I work for a bank in technical support for our Online Banking area, most of my days are filled with assisting people in setting up Quicken, QuickBooks, and MS Money. Our updates are disabled due to the internal firewall so I wasn’t able to test it fully, but that’s what I found while poking around.
Hope it helps. 🙂
-Krobar
Also, I just did some more digging and at least with QuickBooks 2006 it doesn’t have an option at all to print W-2’s, just tells you to fill them out manually and has a guide for how to print them using the preprinted forms.
Where is that guide? The help menu was happy to tell me what a W-2 form is, but didn’t give me a clue how to use Quickbooks to print one out. I have the pre-printed forms. Maybe I just did them manually last year and I’m remembering wrong.
I already have the forms, but I don’t own a typewriter. The thought of trying to get the right entry in the right space using Word sounds mind bogglingly tedious.
That was very helpful. Thank you!
No update SHOULD. But many do anyway. Sometimes it’s up-selling: they want to force you to buy a premium version just to keep the functionality you started out with. Sometimes they’re replaced it with something they think is better, but doesn’t happen to work for your situation. And sometimes they were just going through the feature list, and somebody said, “Oh, nobody ever uses that.”
I’ve been in on those conversations. They tend to go something like this:
“Nobody ever uses that feature.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, it stands to reason. It’s not a useful feature.”
“Have you ever asked whether anyone uses it?”
“What would be the point? No-one uses it.”
Lather, rinse, repeat. The circular logic just keeps right on circling.
Intuit products have a bad history of this. Every time I’m forced to upgrade Quicken, it seems another feature I used has either vanished, become harder to use, or won’t do what I used to do with it any more.
If you grab the pdf from the the government’s stite, you can fill it out with either Adobe Acrobat (if you have the full version not the reader) or Photoshop. (or any other pdf editor)
I went to Help > Year End Guide > scroll down to ‘M’ Print and mail Forms W-2, W-3, 1099, 940, 941 and 1096 is where I found the links. Because my phones not ringing right now I went ahead and cut and paste the rest:
For each employee there are eight different copies of Form W-2:
Copy A to be filed with the Social Security Administration
Copy B to be given to the employee
Copy C with instructions and Notice to Employee to be given to the employee
Copy D for your records
Copy 1 (two copies) to be filed with state and/or local tax departments, if required
Copy 2 (two copies) to be given to employee
You need one copy of Form W-3, to be filed with the Social Security Administration
For complete filing instructions for Forms W-2 and W-3:
Open the Payroll Tax Form window.
Select an employee.
Click Review/Edit.
Click Print form. To order paper supplies or forms, click the How to order tax forms link.
Under For employer, select Employer filing instructions: for W-2 and W-3 forms
Click Print.
Click Close Window to close the print window.
whoops hit Post too soon, I don’t know how much this is going to help, because it’s outside of what I do, but hopefully a little poking around there will get you the rest of what you need. It does talk about how you CAN print out your own W-2’s but the IRS requires it be done on perforated paper. They also have links to order blank W-2’s from them, though I suspect it’s a bit more bulk than you guys need. 🙂
from the link for ‘Complete filing instructions’.
also:
Go to the Employees menu and click Process Payroll Forms.
Select Federal form and click OK.
Select Annual Form W-2/W-3 – Wage and Tax Statement.
Enter a year into the Year field. Be certain that the year you enter is the tax year for which you want to process W-2 forms.
Click OK.
Okay I did some poking around of my own. I found the instructions. They start with “click process payroll forms” and continue with simple instructions about printing the forms. Only when I click the “process payroll forms” button it says I’m not subscribed to their service and gives me the option to either subscribe or cancel my request entirely.
When I go to their support site I can not get a question answered without paying.
Bleargh, I’m sorry, that’s something I can’t test because our test account doesn’t have any employees set up. Under my employee menu it doesn’t even have the option to process payroll forms, it just has the employee center, enter time, and add payroll service.
I don’t have any contacts there to put you in touch with either, you may want to check out http://www.quickbooksgroup.com which is a user support forum, there’s no charge for that.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help. 🙁
Thanks for spending so much time trying. I really appreciate it. It helped me move from pounding my head on the wall in frustration into a problem solving mindset.
not a problem, it was nice to be helping someone nice who wasn’t yelling at ME for a change 🙂
Some day, a judge or legislator is going to get bitten by one of those “downgrades” and the software companues will get their shrinkwrap licenses ruled invalid and be required to have their programs “do what they say they will”.
I’m not holding my breath, but on that day a lot of marketing types and management types are going to get executed by their CEOs. Not that the CEOs are blameless…