The 2019 Canadian Payroll tax updates for Dynamics GP seem like the gift that keeps on giving! Hopefully anyone reading this has already installed the “Round 2” tax update issued in mid-January. If you have not yet installed that and are running Canadian Payroll in GP 2015, 2016 or 2018/18.2, read on!
Brief recap
The “round 2” update fixed a few issues, that the Dec 2019 update missed or broke. One of the things that it corrected was fixing an issue with 2019 T4 records, where box 24 and box 26 were maxing to the wrong amounts, using 2018 maximum values instead of 2019 maximum values.
The issue
The specific issue uncovered by a client I visited this week is something that didn’t occur to me when I wrote my Round 2 blog post. If you edit your T4 records, when you save them, it will reset the Box 24 and 26 values to whatever the maximum allowable value is in the current code base. That means, if you have not installed the Round 2 update yet, every time you edit someone’s T4 record and save it, those box values might get reset back to the 2018 max (if the employee maxed out during the year).
The impact
The challenge here is you may be affected and not realize it, OR, you noticed a problem and found you had to keep re-running the update script referenced in my Round 2 tax update post. All of the guidance - including mine - said you could simply run Create T4 then run the script and you’d be fine. That may be incorrect. The max is set incorrectly during the Create T4 process but the save routine in the T4 Edit window also sets the value to the max if you enter a value higher than the max.
How to tell if you’re affected
This only impacts you under the following circumstances:
- You are using Dynamics GP with Canadian Payroll
- You have installed the Dec 2019 YE update but not the Jan 2020 round 2 update.
- You have employees whose EI Insurable Earnings or CPP Pensionable Earnings exceeded the 2018 maximums.
- You needed to use the Edit T4 function to update any of those employees’ T4 records.
To check, you may find the value in Box 24 and/or Box 26 are the 2018 maximums again after saving, even if you ran the script to update the CPY40101 table before editing the T4. You could simply check the T4 Edit on an employee to see what value is on a maxed employees’ record.
- The 2019 EI max insurable earnings would show as $53,100
- The 2019 CPP max pensionable earnings would show as $57,400
- Any other values in there might be 2018 maximums if the employee should have the max value.
To fix, either install the round 2 update or complete your edits and re-execute the SQL script from the Microsoft blog once you’re done to “reset” the box 24/26 values one last time.
Check your T4’s carefully!