- [Instructor] Once you have
your EFTPS registration completed
and you have your EIN number,
one of the first taxes you're going to face is your 941s.
A form 941 is really just a form used by the government
to keep track of payroll taxes.
That's FICA and income taxes,
and this includes both taxes paid by you
and by your employees.
For most firms, you're going to need to make 941 deposits
every two weeks.
Those deposits can throw off monthly PNL reporting,
so they are a pain,
but at least the process for making the deposits
is not too time consuming once you get used to it.
Let me show you how that works.
So I'm here at the EFTPS dashboard,
and I'm going to make a payment.
Now I'm going to log in to my EFTPS account
in order to make a payment.
So once I've put in my EIN number, my PIN,
which is assigned to me when I complete EFTPS registration,
and my password, I'll be ready to go.
You should make sure
that you write down your PIN number for EFTPS.
If you don't, you're going to have to call
the federal government in order to get that
or go back through your old paperwork to find it.
Either way, it can be time consuming.
So go ahead and log in.
Now the nice thing about EIN numbers, remember,
is that they're not linked to you personally,
so there's a lot less risk
of somebody stealing your EIN number
and trying to steal your identity somehow.
These are commonly used numbers across industry.
Now, we're logged in here,
and we're going to select which form we want to do.
There's a variety of options here.
We've got our 720s,
This is for federal excise tax returns,
our 940s, these are an annual return,
but we pay deposits on them quarterly.
We've got a variety of others.
Probably the most common form that's used,
in my experience, is the 941s.
This applies to basically all employers
that have any employees,
but we use EFTPS for a variety of purposes.
So you'll get very familiar with it and used to it
as you go through and pay taxes
on a variety of different levels.
So we've selected our 941s.
So every two weeks, we're going to have to come through
and make a federal tax deposit
based on our FICA and our income taxes.
So once we've selected federal deposit, we'll click next,
and this is where it's going to want us
to put in the payment amount.
Now I'm going to simply put in $1000,
but you'll need to put in
the actual payment amount that is due.
To find this, you'll either get it out of
your payroll software, be it QuickBooks or Excel,
or from your bookkeeper if you use one,
and then you'll need to put in
which quarter you want the payment to be associated with.
941 payments are made in a biweekly basis,
but you have to make all of these payments
on a quarterly basis.
In other words, at the end of the quarter,
the government is going to look at
how much you should have paid to 941
versus how much you actually did pay.
If you've underpaid, you're going to have to
make up that shortage.
If you've overpaid, they'll send you a refund
or let you apply it to the next quarter.
So you have to go through and select
which quarter you want this applied to.
Then you're going to pick what settlement date
you want it to be on.
So I'll simply pick that we want this done for tomorrow.
We click next, and now it's going to ask
how do we want this broken out
between social security, Medicare, and tax withholding.
For our purposes, I'm simply going to say
$300 for social security, $300 for Medicare,
and $400 for tax withholding.
In reality, social security will probably
be the biggest chunk of this,
but it doesn't really matter.
The key is, all of this has to add up to $1000.
If it doesn't, you'll get an error message
where ETFPS tells you, hey, something's off here.
So now I'm going to click next,
and this gives me a summary telling me
what tax form I'm paying money on,
which quarter this is going to be applied to,
the payment amount, our settlement date,
our subcategories that add up to the total $1000,
and then what account number and what routing number we have
and the bank we're using.
Once we're finished, we'd click Make Payment.
Now I'm not going to do that
just because we don't want this payment
to actually go through, but from here,
the process is pretty simple.
Now, the key is,
be sure that you make your 941 payments on a timely basis.
If you don't, the IRS is going to get really,
really ugly about it really quickly.
Fines will just be the starting point.
Now you're ready to make those filings on a timely basis
and stay out of trouble.