QuickBooks 2016: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Doing Payroll

When you first start your business, you may be the proud owner of every job title in your company: receptionist, sales rep, technician, bookkeeper, janitor, and CEO. But if your company is like most, you’ll eventually hire people to help you with all those tasks.

Unless you run an all-volunteer operation, sooner or later, your employees are going to want to get paid. When that time comes, you face the daunting task of dealing with payroll, which is the name for all the financial records you have to keep for employees’ salaries, wages, benefits, bonuses, withholdings, and deductions. If you decide to process payroll in QuickBooks, you need to sign up for one of the payroll services that Intuit offers. To keep expenses low, you can choose a bare-bones service that provides only updated tax tables. At the other end of the spectrum, you can opt for Intuit’s full-service payroll. Or you can compromise somewhere in the middle.

After you choose a payroll service, your next task is to set up everything QuickBooks needs to calculate payroll amounts. You can walk through each step on your own or use an interview feature built into QuickBooks. (If you opt for Intuit’s full-service payroll [Recording Transactions from a Payroll Service], they do some of this setup for you.) Either way, the Payroll Setup interview keeps track of what you’ve done and what you still have to do.

Note

Intuit updates its payroll services between QuickBooks editions. That way, you get the latest ...