Virginia Form VEC-FC-20 in QuickBooks: What Fills Automatically and What Doesn't
QuickBooks prefills most of Virginia's quarterly unemployment tax form, but certain fields require manual entry — here is what to check before filing.
QuickBooks Desktop handles Virginia’s Form VEC-FC-20 — the Employer’s Quarterly Tax Report — by prefilling wage, tax, and employment data from your company payroll records. But several fields on the state’s pre-printed form are left blank by design, and users who file without reviewing those gaps risk incomplete or late submissions.
What QuickBooks Fills For You
When you open the VEC-FC-20 form window, QuickBooks populates most fields using the company, payroll, and employee data already in your file. In the typical scenario where all payroll has been processed through QuickBooks for the full quarter, you generally will not need to enter additional information. The software calculates unemployment insurance amounts based on the wage and tax data it has tracked throughout the quarter.
Fields You May Need to Complete Manually
A handful of fields on the VEC-FC-20 are not populated automatically because they come from the pre-printed form the Virginia Employment Commission mails to employers, or because they depend on information outside your payroll data:
Different Quarter — If you are filing for a calendar quarter other than the one shown on the form, you must enter the correct quarter manually.
Industry and Area — These fields appear on the pre-printed state form and must be carried over from the version Virginia mailed you.
Line B-6, Interest — If tax is paid after the due date, interest accrues at 1.5 percent per month, which works out to an 18 percent annual rate. Any portion of a month counts as a full month for this calculation.
Line B-7, Penalty — A $75 penalty applies to each report filed after the final due date. This penalty extends to state and political subdivision employers. However, no penalty is assessed for quarters in which no wages were paid. Newly covered employers should note that all quarterly reports must be filed by the due date of the quarter in which their employer account number was assigned; otherwise, the $75 penalty applies to each report. Interest continues to accrue even when a penalty is not triggered.
Who Must File Electronically
Virginia requires electronic filing for two categories of filers: employers with 100 or more employees, and payroll processors handling 100 or more employer-clients. If you fall into either group, paper filing is not an option for this form.
Saving, Summarizing, and Filing
QuickBooks provides several utilities within the form window for common tasks. You can save a copy of the completed form as a PDF for your records, and you can export a summary of your payroll data to Excel if you need to review the underlying numbers outside of QuickBooks. The form window also includes options for electronic filing and electronic payment of any balance due.
For general navigation help within the form window — or for troubleshooting a specific issue with the form itself — the Help button inside the form window points to the relevant guidance.
A Practical Note on Review
The core workflow issue users encounter with VEC-FC-20 is not that QuickBooks miscalculates the tax — it is that the manually completed fields are easy to overlook. The Industry and Area fields in particular require information that lives on the paper form Virginia sent you, not in your QuickBooks file. If you have recently registered for a Virginia employer account number, double-check the filing deadline for your initial reports, since the $75-per-form penalty applies retroactively to each quarter if those first reports are late.
For broader payroll form troubleshooting, the form window’s built-in help is the fastest starting point, and exporting your payroll summary to Excel before filing gives you a second look at the numbers behind the form.