 If you were to export or have this reporting done by someone else, like a third party, then you wouldn't need all the detail, right? In that case, what they would do is process the paychecks, which would still come out of your checking account. You're still going to have to reconcile and whatnot. But you don't need the detailed reporting that would give you all the information on an employee by employee basis. You can basically think of all of your employees kind of like as one employee and enter the transactions necessary to get your financial statements correct. So there's a couple ways you could do that as well. So that would mean that the payroll company would be taking care of the paycheck stubs and hopefully possibly some of the human resources stuff and whatnot. And then you would be entering a summary of the data into your system in some way, shape or form so that you have the correct financial statement reporting. And what would be the accounts that would have to be supported on the balance sheet? Well, clearly the checking account is going to go down when you pay the employees. So we're going to have to enter the data into the system so that we have the paychecks going down. We're also going to have to have a decrease in the checking account when we pay off the liabilities for the taxes. And then we might have payroll liabilities down here. And the payroll liabilities will typically be when you process the paychecks, everything that you withheld will be a payroll liability. That's the money that you kept from your employees that is now a liability that you're going to have to pay to the government. So until you pay the withholdings after the pay period, you're going to have basically a liabilities that you'll need to be recording here until you make those payments. And then on the income statement side of things, you're going to have a couple of accounts within here. One is going to be your payroll, I mean, your payroll expense type of form, expenses. And then you might have another account that would be the payroll taxes. So that's what you would have to be recording on the financial statements just to get your financial statements in essence recorded properly. But if you weren't doing it within QuickBooks, you might not need all that other detail, the detailed breakout on a per employee, per paycheck basis that you would need in order to comply with all the other kind of reporting needs for the quarterly reports, the pay stubs and the year end reporting. So if you had another company doing that, then you can run it in that system. Also note that you might even be able to be kind of more in a cash-based system. So you want to think about if you're a bookkeeper, how are you going to do payroll? How are you going to try to get together clients that fit into a system that you might be able to increase, scale up the system? Do you want a system in which you're processing the payrolls in the system or possibly you get a network with other people? Possibly you try to run your bookkeeping on basically a cash-based basis as much as you can based on the bank feeds and then possibly working with another payroll company that can help to specialize in the payroll information and then possibly working with a CPA firm that can help you in the year end tax preparations and any financial statement kind of reporting needs. So on the simplest method, if you were to do something like that, you can actually wait until the checks clear the bank and just record them as payroll expense as they clear the bank. You're going to have a timing issue because really there was a withholding. So instead of recording the liabilities on the books, you're just going to wait until you make the payments on the liability side of things for the payroll taxes and then you'll record those as in essence payroll expense in basically one account and that way you can basically be on a cash-based system, you can basically use the bank feeds and you can have the other payroll company doing all the payroll reporting needs and then there's usually a timing difference when you do that because at the end of the year, you're going to need to be able to report any liabilities at that point and you might need to be breaking out the payroll taxes on the income statement versus the payroll expense and you can then have your CPA or tax preparer, if they are working with you in a standardized system to be able to do that journal entry as of the date that you have to prepare the taxes and or do your financial statements by taking the payroll information and then using it to determine what the payroll liability should be as of the end of the year, December 31st most likely and possibly breaking out the payroll expense account into payroll taxes and payroll expense if necessary based on the payroll reports and the end of the year reporting the 941s, the 940s and the W-2s and W-3s that they get from the payroll company so those are a couple different ways that you can deal with it notice that the payroll should be basically nothing more than like a vendor section type of thing you pay an employee cash goes down and you have an expense form but because of the laws and regulations related to it we have way more complexity with the payroll and so now we've got all these reporting needs, there's withholding needs, there's human resources kind of needs so then the question is well how can you deal with those reporting needs as efficiently as possible either you're going to have to pay for it one way or the other either you pay for it within QuickBooks to process it within QuickBooks or you create a network with an external payroll provider try to automate your QuickBooks as much as possible and then possibly of course you want to also have a CPA firm or tax firm in the mix as well and if you're mixing up the jobs properly or allocating the jobs properly then you can create a pretty efficient system