Admin Software - Cash basis accounting

[pjb1835]

I know this may sound ignorant, but we'd like to import financial activity into admin software on a cash basis for top heavy, refunds, RMD's, 5500's, etc, but still want to run coverage and nondiscrimination tests only on census and calculated annual additions.  How do the various softwares handle cash basis accounting?

[ESOP Guy]

Back a number of years ago when I worked on Omni+ you could do this fairly easily.  Omni+ had a trade date, an allocation date (not exact term it has been a few years but i will give an example soon) and a post date.

So let's say you were dong the TPA work for a daily 4k plan.  You wanted to post the last 2016 4k deferrals as of 12/31/2016 so they were on the 2016 ADP test, but they were deposited on 1/4/2017 and you were inputting the data on 1/5/2017.

Your allocation date was:  12/31/2016

Your trade date was:  1/4/2017

Your post date was:  1/5/2017

You could write calculators that allowed you to pick and choose which dates you wanted to look at for a number of the calculations.  So when you wanted the ADP test to include this deposit you used the allocation date.  If you wanted to exclude this account you could run a calculator to look for a trade date of 12/31/2016 or before and it would exclude this deposit.  (In fact there was a post time down to the tenth of a second with the post date so if you really wanted to select just a transaction you could do it by putting in the post time.) 

When I first had to learn Omni+ I hated it as it was so flexible it seemed hard to work with.  I was used to systems that did more of the work for you.  But over the years I came to love the ease and flexibility of the calculators.   Now that I work in a shop that doesn't use Omni+ I find myself constantly thinking I could solve this problem I have in Omni+ so fast with a simple calculator. 

As I re-read you question I am not sure I answered your question or not. 

[hr for me]

OT: Flash from the past...It's been close to 20 years since I was trained on and used Omni ( I think it was pretty close to when it first came out), but I too loved the flexibility after having come from systems that were not flexible at all.  I could program it to do just about any calculations.