QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Payroll & Employees

Perhaps the most annoying things about employees is their insistence on being paid. Sad to say, but 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. If you choose one of the QuickBooks’ payroll service options, the Payroll & Employees preference category 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 them.

Tip

If you’d rather someone else incur brain damage figuring out government payroll requirements, on the QuickBooks menu bar, choose Employees→Payroll Service Options→Learn About Payroll Options. In a web browser window, the Intuit QuickBooks Payroll screen displays buttons you can click to learn more. If you like what you see, you can then sign up for one of Intuit’s payroll services.

On the Company Preferences tab, the QuickBooks Payroll Features area gives you three options for choosing a payroll service: Full Payroll, No Payroll, and Complete Payroll Customers. Because these labels don’t tell the whole story, here’s some info that can help you determine which one you should choose:

• Full Payroll. This is the option you want if you plan to calculate payroll yourself and use QuickBooks’ features to produce the documents, or if you use QuickBooks Basic Payroll, Standard Payroll, Enhanced Payroll, or Assisted Payroll to ...