QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Payroll & Employees

Perhaps the most infuriating characteristic of employees is their insistence on being paid. Sad to say, using QuickBooks for payroll doesn't eliminate the need to transfer money from your company into your employees' pockets, but it can simplify the task. For almost every company, you'll choose one of the payroll service options. The Payroll & Employees preference section is command central for configuring your payroll service and how it operates. Payroll and employee preferences appear on the Company Preferences tab, so only QuickBooks administrators can set these preferences.

On the Company Preferences tab, the QuickBooks Payroll Features area contains three options for choosing a payroll service: Full Payroll, No Payroll, and Complete Payroll Customers. Because the option labels don't tell the entire story, this list helps you determine which option you should choose:

• Full Payroll. If you want to produce payroll documents such as paychecks, payroll reports, and payroll forms including 940 (employer federal unemployment tax), 941 (employer quarterly federal taxes), W-2 (employee wage and tax statement), and W-3 (transmittal of W-2s), choose this option. Choose Full Payroll if you plan to calculate payroll yourself and use QuickBooks features to produce the documents or if you use QuickBooks Do-It-Yourself Payroll or QuickBooks Assisted Payroll to figure out payroll amounts.

  If you want to allocate wages and payroll taxes to jobs, choose the Full Payroll option ...