- [Instructor] SUTA has to be filed and paid
on a quarterly basis.
Unfortunately, not only is this a financial burden,
but it's also a major paperwork burden.
For all employees you have to record information
about what work they did during the semester.
If you have very many employees,
this gets to be quite time consuming.
Let me walk you through the process
so you can see what I mean.
All right, we are here on
the Connecticut Department of Labor's website
where we file and pay our SUTA.
So once you've registered for this
you'll just log in as normal.
In general, the process varies a little bit
from state to state but it's pretty similar
in my experience.
Most of the questions will be
very similar from state-to-state.
So they'll ask us initially up front if anything's changed.
Most of the time the answer is no.
They'll want to know are you out of business?
Did you sell any of the business?
Or buy another business?
Again, the answer is generally no and we'll proceed.
Now from here we'd be able to go through
and actually make the payments at the end of the quarter.
Now I'm not going to actually make a payment
because this is for a live business.
So instead, we're going to view the filing history
so we can look at past payments that have been made
and see how that process looks and how it works.
So to do that I'll come up here to View Filing History.
And I'm going to view the payments
for the third quarter of 2018.
Editor, this is where we want a smooth transition
to the PDF that'll pop up in a minute.
All right, so this is just a copy of the records
from last quarter's unemployment filings,
or SUTA filings, I should say.
Sp what we see here is that we have
every individual employee for the business,
their first and last name, and their employee wages.
Now all of this is fictitious.
It's simply random information that we've made up,
but you get the point.
So every single employee we record what their wages are,
and then we have to pay the SUTA based on that.
So the SUTA tax rate in this particular case is 3.6%,
which means that we've paid $1726 on the total wages
across all of these employees.
So it's not a trivial sum of money.
Our goal of course is to reduce both the tax rate
that we pay and the number of people that we have
to pay wages on by avoiding turnover, quits, and firings,
things like that.
So we had 52,000 in gross wages, 5,000 of that was excess,
47,000 of that was taxable.
At a 3.6% tax rate that resulted in $1726 in total taxes.
Not only is SUTA a big hit financially,
at $1700 per quarter, that adds up to about $8000 per year,
just under that, right?
But it's also a lot of work.
We've got to go through and determine
what the employee wages are for all of these people
every single quarter.
To do that you'll want to get very familiar
with your payroll tax software if you use it
and be able to quickly and easily identify total wages
for every employee during the quarter.
This'll be a time-consuming process
because you have to go through and enter the wages
for the employee as well as in many cases
the number of hours that they've worked,
but you're also going to have to add new details
on any new employees that get hired.
So if Susie Smith is hired this quarter,
you have to go through and fill out
her social security number, her address,
all of the information pertinent to her
as well as her wages.
Again, another good reason to minimize turnover,
because it minimizes the amount of time
you have to spend on SUTA when you get done.
Now you're ready to file SUTA each quarter
and stay out of trouble with the government.