QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Setting Up Employee Records

Before you begin adding employees to the Employee List, you can set up the payroll items that apply to every employee. By doing so, QuickBooks fills in these payroll items for you for each new employee. With these standard payroll items in place, the task of setting up employees for payroll moves much faster.

Setting Employee Defaults

Typically, you use a common set of payroll items for all your employees, such as taxes, health insurance, and 401(k) contributions. Instead of assigning the same payroll items to each employee, you can save these standard items so that QuickBooks fills in most of the payroll fields for you. You can also specify the pay period you use (and the class to apply if you track performance by class).

To set up your default payroll characteristics, choose Lists→ Employee List to open the Employee List window. Click Employee, and then choose Employee Defaults from the shortcut menu. In the Employee Defaults dialog box, you can set up standard items for every type of payroll item you use, as shown in Figure 11-3.

Note

The Employee Defaults dialog box includes the same set of fields and checkboxes that you'll find in the New Employee dialog box on the Payroll and Compensation tab. When you edit an employee record, you can change any default payroll settings that don't apply to that employee.

Figure 11-3. Top: Employee Defaults fill in only ...