Helping company take advantage of a tax credit

I found out last year from the Accounting department at my current company that employers with tipped employees can get a tax credit based on how employees have reported their tips. I guess it's the IRS's way to encourage employers to get their employees to report tips so that they can get the tax from it.

The PEO model is one of co-employment: the client employs someone to do the work while the PEO employs the worker from an HR perspective. If the client doesn't take the tipped employee tax credit (or whatever it's actually called), then the PEO can take it.

For me it has meant developing yet another report from the SQL Server database. The business, of course, wants the report as soon as they can get it, and I and my boss help them understand that it cannot always happen overnight or even in a week.

The report, as many of these I develop lately, involves looking at the transaction history on employees' paychecks to identify reported tips. It sounds simple, and it really is, as long as you know where to look.

Over the past year or so, I've gotten better as I've come to understand where the types of information are stored - the database and the front-end are a modified version of Microsoft Great Plains, and the tables are not always intuitively-named.

I probably should push this application out to the Accounting department, since all I did was run it for last year and the current year. The upper management was certainly surprised at fast I'd turned their request around.