Your APSS Update: Dec. 4, 2014

Vendor News: It's 1099 MISC Time Again!

The end of calendar 2014 is right around the corner.  As the New Year approaches, it’s a good time to review who should get a 1099 MISC Form.

What is a 1099 MISC Form?  Per the Society for Human Resource Management, “The 1099-MISC Form is an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return document used to report miscellaneous payments made to non-employee individuals during the calendar year.”

Who gets one? Per IRS Guidelines and University Policy, non-employees who have received $600 or more in taxable income in a given calendar year.   

When are they sent? The Accounts Payable Shared Services team combines several sources of data to arrive at a final list of 1099 recipients in January.  This list is used to create and mail out 1099s by the end of January.

What can I do to verify required vendors/individuals receive their 1099 MISC Forms?

• Vendor Create: Ensure you communicate why we are paying the vendor so they can be created with the appropriate 1099 withholding code. 
• Non-PO Vouchers: Has your department paid fees, commissions, or compensation for services to a non-employee or independent contractor?
  • If so, make sure you had selected 07 from the Withholding Detail panel on the PeopleSoft Non-PO Voucher.  The Accounts Payable Shared Services team will query the results from PeopleSoft; however, if you notice an error please contact Accounts Payable Shared Services Manager - Rita Wells.
• Awards, Gifts, and Prizes: Has your department paid any awards, gifts, or prizes by cash, gift card, gift certificate, or other non-check payment method to non-employees?
  • If so, the amount of recordable income should be disclosed to the Accounts Payable Shared Services Center before year end.  If you know of awards, gifts, or prizes paid out by a non-check method, please contact Accounts Payable Shared Services Manager - Rita Wells.
• Research Subject Payments:  Has your department paid research participants by cash, gift card, gift certificate, or other non-check payment method?
  • If so, the amount of recordable income may need to be disclosed to the Accounts Payable Shared Services Center before year end.  You can verify which research studies require 1099 reporting by reaching out to your campus’s Research Subject Payment Coordinator before the end of the year.

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T&E News: Understanding Per Diems

Let’s begin at the beginning.  Our good ol’ friends Merriam and Webster define a Per Diem as:

An amount of money given to someone for daily expenses (such as food or fuel) Latin: Per Day.  

To narrow this down even further, our University of Missouri campuses consider per diem’s only to include meals.  Given that our system contains multiple campuses, multiple schools, and multiple research areas, travel to any part of the planet could be a real possibility.  So, from an Accounts Payable perspective, we need to understand University Policy BMP 505 – Allowable Expenses and how to handle per diems for In-State, Out-of-State, and Out-of-Country travel.  To do so, let’s take a quick look at each type of travel.

How is In-State Travel handled? For overnight travel within the state of Missouri, meals will be reimbursed on a per diem basis of $42.00 per day. 

How is Out-of-State Travel handled? For overnight travel outside Missouri but inside the United States (Not including Hawaii and Alaska), meals will be reimbursed on a per diem basis determined by the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Center for Travel Excellence Per Diem Rates Query.  These rates are automatically calculated within the Travel & Expense System.  You can look up per diem rates in advance by going to the DOD’s Per Diem Rates Query webpage and using the “Contiguous United States” query.  Enter the traveler’s destination state and look in the “Local Meals” column for the traveler’s destination city.  This will return the full per diem rate to cover breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

It is important to understand Travel & Expense will populate your per diem based on the final destination for the day.  For example, on day one of a trip you start in Columbia and drive to St. Louis to catch a flight to New York where you spend the rest of the day.  New York would be the location used for that day’s per diem since it is the final destination of the day.

How is Foreign Travel handled? For overnight travel outside the contiguous United States (which included Hawaii and Alaska) meals will also be reimbursed on a per diem basis determined by the Department of Defense’s Center for Travel Excellence Per Diem Rates Query.  You can also look up per diem rates in advance by going to the DOD’s Per Diem Rates Query webpage and using the “Outside CONUS, Non-Foreign Overseas and Foreign” query.  Enter the traveler’s destination state or country and look in the “Local Meals” column for the traveler’s destination city.  This will return the full per diem rate for three meals per day. 

What are the exceptions?

• Hours in Travel Status: Travel status is the time between the moment a traveler departs on their trip until they arrive at their destination. 
  • If this amount is greater than 12 hours, the traveler will receive 100% of the amounts mentioned above. 
  • If the amount is less than 12 hours but equal to or more than 8 hours, the traveler will receive 50% of the amounts mentioned above. 
  • If the amount is less than 8 hours, the traveler will receive 0% of the amounts mentioned above.
• Excluded Meal Allowances: If meals are included in conference registrations or paid by others, the traveler is responsible for making appropriate deductions to the per diem amount when submitting their reimbursement request as it would not be fair for a traveler to claim reimbursement for a meal that they did not pay for.  Excluding meals is done in the Travel & Expense System by indicating which meals have already been paid for.  Breakfast counts for 25%, Lunch 25%, and Dinner 50% of the total daily per diem amount.

Even though the Travel & Expense System makes calculations for you automatically based on your start and stop times as well as the number of excluded meals you report, below are some examples to further illustrate how the system works.

• Example 1: A traveler takes a trip from Columbia, Missouri, to Manhattan, New York.  You’ve looked up the maximum per diem amount per CONUS and it says: $66.00.  If we look at the first day’s travel and assume there was 13 hours of travel status time on that day with no meals paid by other sources, $66.00 could be claimed. 
• Example 2: Using the same information as Example 1, let’s say travel status lasted for 9 hours and a dinner was provided that evening.   In this case, you would start with $66.00 and then deduct 50% for travel status between 8-12 hours to arrive at $33.00.  Then, since dinner was included, you would need to also take an additional 50% off of $33.00 to arrive at a $16.50 claimable per diem.  
• Example 3: A traveler takes a trip from Kansas City, Missouri, to Sikeston, Missouri, and is in travel status for more than 12 hours.  Along the way, the traveler meets with a client at a restaurant to conduct business over breakfast.  The client pays for the traveler’s meal.  At noon, the traveler has arrived in Sikeston for a presentation where lunch is provided.  On the way home, the traveler stops and pays for his own dinner.  In this case, you would start with $42.00 which is the in-state per-diem rate.  Since the traveler was in travel status for more than 12 hours, he is entitled to a 100% of the $42.00 in-state per-diem rate less any excluded meals.  Since breakfast and lunch were both provided to the traveler, he must exclude both meals.  Breakfast and lunch both carry a 25% deduction.  So the traveler would be entitled to 50% of $42.00 or $21.00. 

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Voucher News: Is my Hold Check Ready for Pickup?

If you know where to look in PeopleSoft, that information is just a few clicks away.  All you need to know is your voucher number.  Here’s what you do:

1. Go to: Accounts Payable>Vouchers>Add/Update>Regular Entry>
2. Click on the tab marked “Find an Existing Value”
3. Make sure the Business Unit is correct
4. On the second line (Voucher ID:) type in your voucher number
5. Click on “SEARCH”.  You’ll come to a screen similar to the one below.
6. From the screen below, click on the Payment Tab
7. You’ll come to a screen similar to the one below.  In the bottom right hand corner of the screen, notice the “Handling” field shows a value of “C2”.
   
   1. The letter “C” represents campus (C=COLUM, K=KCITY, R=ROLLA, S=STLOU)
   2. The number “2” represents the payment type.  2 = Hold Check.
8. Also, notice below and to the left of the “Handling” field there is a “Payment Date” and “Reference” field.  These indicate the date the check was created and its check number.
9. So, if you see C2, K2, R2, or S2 as well as a payment date and check number in the fields below, it means your check is ready to be picked up from your campus’s Hold Checks Location. 
10. If you don’t, it means your check is not ready yet.

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Tech tip: Avoiding those Pesky Keying Errors</p>

Did you ever stop and think about how many times in a day you hit a button on your keyboard?  Well let’s just say you are a “robo-human”.  Your supervisor lifts up a little door on the top of your head, pours in three double espressos, and hits the “start” button.  Steam comes out of your ears, you’re wheels start cranking, and off you go typing all day long with no breaks at 40 words per minute. You don’t get up for lunch or any other breaks and you run out of espresso eight hours later and stop.  Sounds like a fun day, huh?  Well, assuming you did that, it would be about 19,200 keystrokes in a day.  Of course robo-humans would perform flawlessly and have zero mistakes. Well…back to reality: We are not robots!  We have distractions and deadlines. We have stressors. We are human. So, we make mistakes. Some research I looked at for this article shows the average person makes about one keying error for every 200 keystrokes.  So, every word in this paragraph that is green would be a mistake at that rate.  If I’m being honest, I made more than that. Thank you spell chek. Darn, another one!

So, if we know we are prone to making keying errors and keying errors lead to big problems in the AP Processing world (payment delays, inaccurate financials, unhappy clients, and so forth), what can we do about it?

First, let’s identify the most common culprits.

1. Transpositions: 

A transposition occurs when you have the right letters and numbers but in the wrong order. 

For example: MoCode C4816 vs. C4618.

2. Misread Characters:

Often times, with poor print quality or when in a rush, it is easy to misread  and thus enter the wrong characters.  The list below shows some of the most often confused:

For example: MoCode CZ123 vs. C2123

Expired Programs, Projects, Classes, or DeptID’s

As you know, our UM Accounting System is dependent on fields of data including DeptID, Program, Project, and Class. Each unique collection of these fields is called a chartfield string. In most cases, chartfield strings have an associated MoCode you can use as a shortcut to populate a chartfield string.  All of the fields of data in a chartfield string are either time sensitive or may be inactive. If you use a chartfield string or MoCode that has expired or inactive data, your journal will go into error status. This of course delay’s your transaction and requires additional time and labor to resolve.

So what are some tips to help avoid these common errors?

• Familiarize yourself with the Misread Characters chart above so you can watch for these common trouble spots.
• Slow down. We all have deadlines. Sometimes you just have to power your way through tasks at the fastest speed. However, if you are making consistent data entry errors, know there are plenty of studies showing increasing errors are correlated with decreasing time for a task.
• Get up and walk around for a few minutes every hour or so to rest your eyes and refresh your mind.
• If you are working with electronic data, try using the copy and paste function instead of typing. It takes out the possibility of human error.  In most software applications you can speed this up with the Control-C (Copy) and Control-V (Paste) key combinations on your keyboards. 
• If you are working with poor print copy, scan/convert it to .pdf format so you can enlarge it see the tiny differences that distinguish letters and numbers.
• For trouble with frequent transpositions and expired chartfield strings, you could work with your fiscal officer or supervisor to develop a strategy to screen for these. If you are unsure of a chartfield string or MoCode, you can always go to WebApps/Fin Search Options/PS Chartfields to research your DeptID, Program, or Project to ensure it is the right one and that it is current. You can research a specific MoCode at WebApps/Fin Search Options/MoCode to search for a specific MoCode.

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