Expert: Vanessa D. Powell, CPA - 10/8/2009

Question
Our small business (5 employees) has a 401K profit sharing plan. All annual reporting is completed by a pension services accounting firm. Historically, they have asked for a paper and pencil ledger of transactions for the year. I would like to put this information into an electronic format. Do you have a suggestion for the best format to accomplish this? Ledger? Journal? I have been looking for an excel template, but without success.Any suggestions would be appreciated

Answer
For a small company, the easiest thing to do is to merge your payroll and pension functions.  Paychex and ADP both provide pension recordkeeping services.  Then, all transactions go through them, and you don't need to provide anything other than beginning (new hire) information.

If that's not an option, then use an excel spreadsheet.  Using different tabs, you can track total employee contributions, employer contributions, loans, loan payments, and distributions.

Although I'm confused as to why they are asking you for an accounting of transactions- if they're doing their job, they shouldn't need anything from you, other than for you to enter the weekly payroll summary into their system.  You may want to look into using someone else.  I've worked with several different recordkeeping services- both large and small- and I've never heard of them asking for you to, essentially, do their job for them.  Why pay them?  You have better things to do.

Best of luck to you!