We updated the 1098-T report with a bunch of new features last week. Here's what you need to know...

First things first

On January 1 of every year, Populi takes all the billing and financial aid information you've entered for your students and automatically generates a 1098-T form. The 1098-T report lets you review, release, and export these forms with tools that, conservatively, save you days of work. We keep an eye on the IRS regulations and make sure that the forms Populi generates comply with whatever new rules and minutiae those industrious pencil-pushers have scribbled into existence. And with the new features, you now have more tools at your disposal to get these forms off your to-do list.

Simply put, Populi does all the rote stuff so you don't have to.

They're compliant

Submitting a 1098-T to the IRS with a bad Social Security Number is what is known in higher ed accounting as a "big fat no-no". We've done a few things to help prevent that:

• Populi flags students with no SSN or an obvious "placeholder" number (e.g. 123-45-6789). It then prevents forms from being released to students who are so flagged. Meanwhile, you know exactly who's SSN's you need to update.
• There's a new checkbox that lets you indicate that you've complied with regulation section 1.6050S-1; said regulation requires you to hunt down the Taxpayer Identification Number (usually just the SSN) for your 1098-T students. This corresponds to the newly-scribbled-into-existence checkbox on the IRS forms.
• Before exporting, you have to release the forms! Exporting unreleased forms frequently leads to a lot of sorrow and heartache, and in the interest of sparing you, we've closed that door.

They're adjustable!

Sometimes, you just gotta adjust a 1098-T. This frequently happens with schools that get started with Populi mid-year or maintain financial records in something like Quickbooks. Now you can adjust the Populi-generated values for any unreleased 1098-T right on the report, a feat that used to require a support request. Changes are recorded to preserve the audit trail, and you can even indicate a voided or corrected form using the adjuster doohickey.

They're un-releasable!

After releasing a form, sometimes you wish you could just... unrelease a form—perhaps you catch an error, or you realize the student doesn't merit a 1098-T this year. Whatever the case, in former times you'd have to get Populi Support on the horn to do such a thing. Now there's a new Hide/Unrelease function in the Actions menu that puts the task on your own timetable.

Thus, the new features (we also put out a bunch of under-the-hood improvements, too). For all the details and how-to's, head over to the Populi Knowledge Base, or fire off a question to the support crew.