Payroll Tax & Compliance
Every time a payslip is approved, ianaiERP records the payroll taxes it produced as permanent, unchangeable facts. Payroll Tax & Compliance is the set of screens built around that record: registering your accounts with each tax authority, watching the deadlines that follow from them, recording deposits against what's owed, correcting a filed return line when needed, and preparing the employer returns themselves. These screens track the software's own records of your payroll tax position — they don't submit filings or move money on your behalf, and nothing here should be read as a statement that a particular obligation has been satisfied.
Where it lives
All five screens are tabs in the Payroll workspace: Tax Registrations, Tax Ledger, Tax Deposits, Filing Adjustments, and Tax Deadlines. Employer Returns is its own tab as well. Each screen's header carries a shortcut to the others it connects to most (for example, Tax Registrations links to the Tax Ledger, and Tax Deadlines links to Employer Returns).
How the pieces connect
- Tax Registrations record that your company is registered with a specific tax authority for a specific program — the account number, the assigned rate and wage base, and the filing/deposit schedule you were given.
- Every time payroll runs, approved payslips post entries into the Tax Ledger — this is the append-only record of what was actually withheld and owed.
- Tax Deposits record what you paid toward those ledger entries.
- Filing Adjustments record an evidenced correction to one line of an already-filed return, when the ledger and the filed form need to be reconciled after the fact.
- Tax Deadlines are generated automatically from your active registrations and list what's due and when.
- Employer Returns is where the actual return document gets prepared, checked, approved, and its filing recorded.
Tax Registrations
One row per employer account with a tax authority — the jurisdiction (country, state or province, and locality if applicable), the authority code, the program code, the tax agency, and your employer account number. Each registration has a status (Pending, Active, Inactive, or Closed), an effective period, a filing and deposit frequency, an assigned rate and wage base, and the form codes you file. You attach the agency's registration notice as evidence and mark the registration reviewed against it before activating. Some programs show extra fields specific to that jurisdiction — for example, selecting which coverage arrangement applies, or linking a related withholding account — determined by the program code you enter.
Tax Ledger
Labeled Immutable Payroll Tax Ledger — a read-only, append-only list. A row is created only when a payslip is approved; nothing in Draft or Calculated status ever appears here. Each entry shows the approval event, the liability date, the employee and pay period, the program and jurisdiction, whether it's an original entry, a reversal, or a correction, whether it's the employee's or employer's side of the tax, the taxable wages, and the tax amount. This is the source of truth every other screen here reconciles against.
Tax Deposits
Called Tax Deposits in the tab bar, this screen records amounts paid toward specific ledger entries — it does not transmit funds itself (the table carries a "Records only — no funds transmission" label). A deposit has a status of Draft, Scheduled, Processing, Settled, Failed, or Void. Recording a settlement means entering the confirmation number and the date it actually settled, then allocating the paid amount across specific Tax Ledger entries until the allocated total exactly matches the payment amount.
Filing Adjustments
Labeled Payroll Tax Filing Adjustments — an evidenced correction to one line of one filed form (for example, a prior-period correction to a specific line of Form 941), not a way to rewrite approved payroll history. Each adjustment links to a tax registration, names the form and line it corrects, carries a signed amount (positive increases the tax, negative decreases it), a reason, and a supporting evidence attachment. A draft adjustment is excluded from anything downstream until it's approved, and it can't be approved by the same person who created it.
Tax Deadlines
Labeled Payroll Tax Deadlines in the header — a read-only schedule generated automatically from your active registrations and their filing rules. Each row shows the due date, the form and obligation type (Return, Deposit, Payment, or Wage report), the coverage period, the registration it belongs to, and a workflow status: Open, Prepared, Approved, Submitted externally, Accepted externally, Rejected externally, Action required, Waived, or Superseded. The "externally" statuses mean exactly that — ianaiERP does not submit anything on its own; those states describe what you've recorded as having happened outside the app.
Employer Returns
The workflow for preparing an actual return moves through fixed stages shown right on the list: Generate → Validate → Reconcile → Approve → File. Each return shows its control state, the registration and form revision it's based on, whether it's reconciled against the Tax Ledger (matched, mismatched, or not yet reconciled), the return's tax amount against payments recorded so far (balance due or overpayment), and who performed each step.
Filing is tracked as a separate, later step from preparation and approval. Once a return is approved, you record that someone submitted it — a human portal submission — with the date and any confirmation reference, and then record the agency's acknowledgement (accepted, rejected, or action required) once you have it. For some return types, this release only prepares the document: you review and download the exact prepared file and complete the actual filing yourself in the tax authority's own portal, and there's nothing further to record here. Either way, a filing record never moves money or exposes your agency login credentials — it's a record of what a person did outside the system.