Payroll Company Preferences

Payroll Company Preferences

 

QBRA-2003: Edit > Preferences > Payroll & Employees > Company Preferences

 

 

QuickBooks Payroll Features: To use the features for payroll, the preference needs to be set to Full Features. Complete Payroll Customers are those businesses who use Intuit’s payroll service and wish to import the information into QuickBooks.

 

Display Employee List by: This is a personal preference to determine if the list should be sorted in first name or last name order.

 

Mark new employees as sales reps: In version 99 and prior the employee initials (up to three) were used as the sales rep code.  This was a problem for two reasons: First, multiple employees with the same initials created complications;

And second, small businesses often use independent contractors so the name would be on the employee list (for sales rep code purposes creating a potential problem with payroll tax audits) and the vendor list (for 1099 purposes which could be inaccurate if the correct name was not used as payments were issued).  In versions 2000 and higher the sales rep code was changed to be a three digit code that was part of a new list and the code can be linked to a name on many of the other lists.  A checkmark in this box will create each employee as a sales rep.

 

Employee Defaults: The template dictates the defaults for each new employee that is set up.  Individual employees can be modified and changed; the purpose here is to increase the speed with which employees can be created. If many employees with similar characteristics need to be entered, or if most employees have a similar set up.  The employee default screen and set up is also available from the employee list.  It is most efficient to set up the payroll items first then modify the template.

 

Printing: It is recommended that the employee address and the company address be printed on the check stub. Printing the sick and vacation info is recommended only if QuickBooks is being used to track these paid time-off amounts. If the amount of sick and vacation time is being tracked in some other way and QuickBooks is not updated to reflect the correct amounts, printing this information may not be accurate, resulting in issues with the employees. The pay period in the check memo field is usually useful to the employee receiving the check.

 

Hide pay rate on Select Employees to Pay window: This is a feature that is unusual, it is possible to hide the pay rate but it appears when you go to process the check any way.  It is difficult to understand the use of this choice.

 

Recall quantity field on paychecks: By default this box is checked.  It improved efficiency if most of the employees are paid the same number of hours each paycheck.  If it varies greatly, un-checking the box will turn off the feature so when creating paychecks the quantity is zero until a value is entered.

 

Print Employee List one per page: Depending on how reports will be used, filing done, etc. this preference can be turned on or off.

 

Report all payroll taxes by customer:job, service item, and class: This option will automatically allocate the employer portion of the payroll taxes as the employee’s net check is calculated. For job costing purposes this can be extremely important to create “loaded” or “burdened” amounts for the payroll tax amounts (there is not a function within the payroll feature for creating payroll burden entries automatically for overhead or any other amounts except the employer portion of payroll taxes). This option takes the process one step further, offering the choice of coding the entire paycheck to one customer:job, service item, and class, or to code the individual earnings items as the paycheck is created.

 

 2/18/04

More information on this topic

Payroll and Employees