- [Instructor] Ideally you've been careful with the 941
deposits and so you won't owe much of anything
at the end of the quarter.
But whether you owe more money to the government or not,
the IRS still wants you to use form 941 to reconcile
your actual liability against your deposits that you've
made as part of the 941 tax process.
So we've got our form 941 here and we've filled out
the first page showing our initial liability and things
like that.
So now what we need to do is reconcile what we've actually
paid against what we owe.
To do that, we're going to turn to page two of the 941.
Now, we paid $1900, we see that here on line 13.
We owed $2530 we see that here on line 12.
What we need to do now is break down that liability
based on each month in the quarter.
Every quarter has three months of course so the IRS
wants to know alright in each quarter, January,
February, and March, what was your liability.
Notice when you get done you're going to have to add up
these liabilities and reconcile them against line 12 above.
So your liability for all three months has to add up
to the same thing you have above for line 12.
Again, this is where you want to have your payroll records
on hand and any information from your payroll software
if you use it.
If you've got all of that well organized and you just
make this a habit, spend five minutes on it every couple
of weeks, at the end of the quarter, the process will only
take ten minutes to fill out this form.
If you don't have those records on hand, it can be an all
day nightmare.
Alright, so for most firms that are out there, you probably
have monthly liabilities right?
If you owe less than $2500, and you don't expect to owe
more than $2500 going forward, then this won't be an issue
you get a simpler process, but for most firms out there
you're going to owe at least $2500 in total
payroll liabilities.
It doesn't take a very big business to hit that level.
Alright so if we go through and put in our monthly
liabilities we might say alright, well our total liabilities
are 2530 so maybe that was $900 in month one, $900 in month
two, and say $730 in month three.
And generally those numbers will be roughly equal unless
you've got some sort of a seasonal business.
If you are a larger firm or if you have special
considerations, you may have to fill out a schedule B
if you're a semi-weekly depositor.
The process works very similar to the process we've
just shown here.
The key is, be able to establish what your tax liabilities
are for each month and then be able to reconcile that
against what you say your total quarterly tax
liabilities are.
You want to make this process easy on yourself.
Try to make sure that you're paying the proper amount
every couple of weeks so that your monthly liabilities
match what you've actually paid per month.
That'll avoid you having to go through and make payments
at the end of the quarter.
Once you've done all that you'll sign your form
and then you'll come down and if you owe money you'll have
to send in this payment voucher down below
with your final contribution at the end of the quarter.
That process is a little bit of a hassle, so again
to make your life easy, I certainly recommend making
the proper bi-weekly deposits to the 941 form.
If you find that you're a little short at the end
of the quarter, you might even top up that last deposit
just so that you're not going to have to mail this in
by hand.
If you get a refund and you want the check mailed to you,
you mail the 941 form to a separate mailbox, alright.
Once you've done this, whether you owe any money
or are owed money, or you're dead even, you still have
to turn around and mail in the form 941 to the IRS,
be sure that you keep a copy of it for your records.