How to do Payroll in QuickBooks
Written by: Editorial Team
Published on: October 5, 2021
You may be new or familiar with QuickBooks, but the truth is, there are still new things for you to find out and be able to get to the bottom of all the features the accounting software has to offer. There are so many things that you can do with QuickBooks like inventory management, managing portfolios of investment, and checking payroll accounts for employees.
QuickBooks is meant to be an easier way to do accounting in the most basic forms. Today, you'll learn how to do Payroll to make an accurate and precise recording that allows your employees to receive the compensation packages they deserve working hard in your company.
Understanding the importance of payrolls
Before we delve deeper into specific steps to take, you must first understand the importance of managing payroll correctly. Firstly, employees are working on getting fairly compensated with the benefits attached to their salaries. If your company has many employees, you're going to have an even more difficult time managing your payroll accounts.
Fortunately, doing Payroll in QuickBooks is more accessible than manually doing it yourself. However, there are still things to learn and process to make it a habit of getting used to the integration and system of QuickBooks for faster and more efficient means of doing bookkeeping.
If you're a newcomer to the scene, QuickBooks will slowly teach you how to do practical accounting and bookkeeping concerning Payroll. It doesn't require one to be an accounting expert to learn QuickBooks' navigation tabs and main features. A high school student can learn QuickBooks given the time and effort into tinkering with the software.
The challenges of payroll management
Doing manual payroll management is an extremely taxing task for the bookkeepers as they are required to check and manually recheck items. It's hard to miss the more detailed data that are incredibly crucial in making accurate statements.
Furthermore, other accounting software is also not as intuitive and optimized for easier use. For the most part, the menus and tabs are difficult to navigate. There's nothing worse than complicated software for accounting used when information is crucial in the auditing process later down the year.
These challenges are easily circumvented when doing Payroll in QuickBooks as the vision of the software is to ensure that the users have the best experience in using the application. So many users are praising QuickBooks for its incredible intuitiveness to make the experience for accountants, bookkeepers, and new business owners to get the desired outcome for their books.
The info you need to start payroll management.
Before you get into the actual steps of managing your payroll management, here is a checklist of items that you need to know first to make the process of doing your payroll accounting much easier:
- Know where to payroll navigation is
Once you log into your QuickBooks account, you need to click Payroll, then tick Employees. This way, you can get started with your payroll accounts management, leading you to the next screen for further optimization.
When clicking on the Payroll button that's just midway through a tab that shows a list of options to navigate from, you can spot the Employees button to check the compensation values of each individual who works for your company.
This is a helpful tool when you just signed up for QuickBooks and are new to the payroll system. This navigation platform is also beneficial for HR support, where they can track employee productivity through the working hours being inputted.
You can even start a 30-day free trial, so you'll get used to the system more and have an easier time with it.
- Put in information on how and what you'll be paying your employees.
The next part you need to pay attention to is the status of your payments made with employees. This means that you're going to monitor whether or not your employees are getting paid or have yet to receive their salaries.
The best part about this is that if you aren't used to the integrated technology process found in QuickBooks, you can make time and shift to the manual setting first so you can get productive already if you want some more time to master the craft of QuickBooks' features.
Furthermore, you are also required to add year-to-date payroll information for growth and finance data to get recorded for future reference. As you may know, the accounting department is responsible for giving information that the finance department will assess to maximize profits.
Nevertheless, key data inputs will help you find the traction needed to record accurate information into the software, so you'll have backlogs and archives of files showing analysts the exact data for their decision-making moves.
This can also help formulate sheets and workbooks that automate by themselves when jotting down specific data entry points and values every time a payroll transaction transpires.
- Adding employees to your QuickBooks database
In their first three years in operations, growing companies will soon find out that expansion is complex and challenging, significantly scaling in a rapid motion. This means that accounting will get stressed in adding employees, infrastructure, and equipment to their books.
But, because we're primarily concerned with Payroll, the employee chart has to constantly get updated for accurate data entries that will reflect on the final audit of different financial statements that each item will affect from one to another.
By simply clicking Add an Employee in the navigation tab, you can monitor, add, and revise information concerning the said employee. Adjusting for tax returns and deductions will also add to the books' businesses as these are extensive to view and sort out.
- Completing employee details
By doing Payroll in QuickBooks, it's essential to have a complete and comprehensive information tab on every employee working in your company. Without these, you can't achieve the ideal results in bookkeeping which is the entire premise of doing accounting in the first place.
For reference, here are the required actions you need to do:
- Pay schedule to specifically pay the scheduled releases of employee compensation can be achieved in the Create Pay Schedule button over the Employee section. This way, you won't be expected to update the software every time salary day comes for initial data entries. Everything is optimized and automated for you by doing this particular action, which is the first step to creating the most intuitive QuickBooks payroll system for your company.
- Employee pay is next, and it's the amount of money you pay your employee pre-tax and benefits. This is the raw number of the employee salary you're going to jot down in the system for the actual costing of employee services per hour of work done.
- As you finish adding the said value of compensation for the employees, you're now going to deduct withholding taxes, benefits, and other late and absences occurrences to adjust to disposable income. In doing so, you must first choose the Enter W-4 form and choose between the current year's tax code or an earlier version. For tax-related purposes, it's best to go to the taxation tab of QuickBooks or get a tax accountant to sort tax-related queries.
- Entering Year to Date data for employees' compensation made for the whole year is also advised to set a reference point in potential and actual growth for the future. This is one of the important actions in accounting and bookkeeping, especially when using QuickBooks.
- Finally, jot down the payment methods for each employee working to submit and wire transfer all the compensation packages to them in a neat and orderly fashion. This will also lead to automated deductions and scaling in the company's actual balance sheets and income statements for better and more comprehensive output in doing the accounting works.
How to execute Payroll in QuickBooks
Here are the steps to do QuickBooks payroll:
Step 1: Run Payroll
When opening and logging into QuickBooks, ensure that your dashboard has all the information of your newest tasks and click run payroll to open the tab in the right corner of the panel.
Step 2: Enter the current hours worked by your employees.
There will be a viewable regular hours column while you enter the current working hours your employees are inputting. You can preview these accounts by simply going on the records sheets, which are revisable to your liking.
Other things you might want to look at in this tab are the staff's actual working hours, fewer breaks, updated inputs, and hours to pay computations that you want to revise.
Step 3: Review revised entries, then submit the Payroll
The final step is to get everything ready for the records to straighten out and finalize all data entries to be as accurate as pre-adjustments. After reviewing, you can then send the Payroll to each of the accounts of their preferred payment methods and systems.
FAQs
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the customer feedback received with QuickBooks' services:
"When doing my accounting work, it was seamless and easy to do. There was very little to learn, but that's because I was already an accountant.
The biggest question is: does it cater to beginners? Given little time to work with the interface, it is catered to newcomers in bookkeeping. It's a cheap alternative to manual and more complex software in the market." - Jean.
"There were so many reasons for me to go for automated software that helps with my accounting work. I have to say, it's an impressive software to have especially when you are just beginning to learn the ways of bookkeeping." - Hank.
"For the longest time, I was looking for the perfect software that helps me with accounting, and I've finally found one. QuickBooks made me do Payroll without any issues and the best part is I was able to learn it in a very quick time!" - Clarissa.
"There were a lot of things to like about QuickBooks, and one of the things I want to highlight is the intuitiveness of the technology. During my payroll management, I was able to do a pretty good job with accuracy and efficiency that worked well for me at the end of the day." - Evan.
"If there's anything that I learned from using QuickBooks, it's the fact that I was able to make my enthusiasm for payroll management-- which I have zero before-- get to me and I thoroughly enjoyed doing my Payroll now. How amazing is that?" - Ellen.
Summary
Doing Payroll in QuickBooks is very easy, and with the right tools and software integration and configuration, you'll become excited using QuickBooks for payroll management. Many dread the idea of optimizing the payroll system, but here, it's further from being an impossible task or something that you want to pull your hair out.
Also, QuickBooks has so many benefits in Payroll like:
- Get accurate and optimized tabs to keep updates like vacation leaves, sick leaves, and tracking bonuses.
- Being able to track the employee description at will without any problems.
- Allowing you to check for pre-tax Payroll and deducting taxes to withhold, which are made very simple through automated software technology.
- Giving you many options like ledger and presentation of records that will come useful during quarterly reports where the board is concerned.
- It gives you a clear and concise picture of getting the best results for your company regarding how data is presented for forecasting and analysis.
- You also get the benefits of easy navigation, which is essential to know the options, tools, functions, and different tabs for different accounts and line items.
- The pricing is incredibly affordable for the services that are being offered.
- Payroll management is made easier through quick response times and updates automatically through online means.
All neatly tied up in different packages. The higher the package, the better and more prolific the features will become. So, if you're interested in making your payroll management system better, feel free to grab a package of any variations from QuickBooks.
And finally, you can also have many users access your books which is great for management purposes. For more prominent companies, you can do more by subscribing to more extensive and heftier packages that have more features in your arsenal.
Conclusion
Is payroll management easier this time around? Absolutely. The way you can turn your books into an optimized machine where you don't need to heavily and manually jot down individual descriptions and accounts is incredibly useful.
Expect more efficient productivity on your part, and the learning process is easy enough that you won't need to have a degree to utilize the software entirely. Doing your Payroll in QuickBooks will see that your business can grow due to less work and stress required for you and your accountants and making decisions out of the information given by the software.
If you are interested, don't hesitate to learn more and consider these helpful steps as a beginner entry point to an easier and more efficient means of accounting for payroll accounts. Quickbooks is a helpful tool not just for individuals but for small businesses too!
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