 payroll cycle, I'm gonna go to the flowchart over here. This is the desktop flowchart, but I'm just gonna get an idea of the cycle of payroll just as we did with the other cycles. Now remember, payroll is basically the same thing as a vendor cycle. I mean, if there were no taxes or withholdings or HR stuff, then payroll would just be human resources. That is payroll would just be another vendor. We would just say, okay, you worked for me. I would pay you just like a contractor. I would write a check at the end of the thing or give you an electronic transfer and it would just record payroll expense. And the other side would go to a decrease of the checking account, we're done. We shook hands. I paid you what I promised to pay you, we're done. But it's not that easy because of all the laws and whatnot related to the payroll, which includes not least of which the withholdings, at least from a just journal entry standpoint in the complexities. So what makes payroll more complex? Well, on the federal tax side of things, we have to withhold taxes for the employees and pay them on the employee's behalf. That includes federal income tax, social security and Medicare. And then we have to pay taxes on top of that as well. That's our matching for social security Medicare. We have some taxes that are on our side that are not on the employee's side, such as federal unemployment tax, FUTA, and we could have state taxes, which will change depending on what state we're in and if we have a company that's large enough and employs people in multiple states. And then we might have different laws related to different states. QuickBooks is quite good in getting better and better at customizing its setup per state. So I can kind of automate that once I set up the system, which is nice. We also have some human resources kind of components, meaning all that kind of stuff on the withholdings has an account, has a journal entry component that's kind of technical and difficult, but we also have reporting requirements. So for example, I have to tell my employees what their gross pay was and what their net pay it is. I can't just write them a check. I got to tell them with a pay stub in some way email to them if it's an electronic transfer or something like that to give them availability so they can see what they earned and what we took from them for the gross pay to the net pay. And so, and I have to do that on a pay by pay period as well as on a year to date summary. So that's gonna be a requirement. We also have of course the reporting requirements of the W2s that we're gonna have to give to them as well. And there could be other kind of human resources requirements, sick pay and paid leave and that kind of stuff could be different from state to state that may not have as technical and a journal entry component, but a human resources component. So human resources and payroll can be tied together and an ADP for example, sometimes is good at handling some of those broader issues to make sure you're in compliance with laws outside of just like the withholding laws. We also have benefits that are often tied to employees such as if you wanna set up a 401K plan or a SEP or something like that, a simple IRA or something. And then health insurance often goes through and those could be voluntary withholdings which can have the same kind of complications. So that's why the payroll gets quite complex and detailed in the system. So just entering payroll, typically you can enter the time if you have hourly employees. Well, first we'd set up the payroll, make sure that you have it set up properly for the locations that you're in and then we would be entering possibly time if you're entering time, but you don't have to enter the time because this time entry is often used to say bill people in a job cost system, but it can be used also to count the hours to enter the number of hours in order to process the payroll. The main thing we do when we process payroll is the form. You might think of it as a form which is gonna generate multiple checks. So clearly when we issue the payroll checks, it's similar to a check type form or an expense form. If it's an electronic transfer that decreases the checking account. But like some of these other checks that we saw like a special check like a bill pay check, it's gonna have its own little widget and its own little indication that it's a special payroll check. And then we process the payroll whenever we choose to process payroll as a business, typically weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly or monthly. So we have to process during those time frames and then sometime after we process the payroll, when we process the payroll, we're gonna generate multiple checks to our employees, however many employees, which are gonna decrease the checking account by the net pay, but they earned the gross pay. So the difference between gross and net are gonna be the withholdings, social security, Medicare, federal income tax, any kind of benefits, any kind of state withholdings that we're gonna record as a payable that we have to then, that we in theory took from the employees or kept or withheld from them, in other words. And our side of taxes, of federal unemployment tax and our share social security, Medicare, and we're then gonna have to pay that sometime, pretty much like right after we process the payroll or some point after we process the payroll to pay the withholdings to the government and to the benefits and so on and so forth. So that's the general process that we're gonna do on payroll, that's the normal cycle. And then within that cycle, we're also gonna have reporting requirements to the Fed and possibly to the state. Those are gonna be a form 941 quarterly, every quarter, and a form 940 at the end of the year, as well as W2s and a summary W3. So those look like this, this is just from irs.gov. This is a 941, so this is gonna show basically the federal income tax, the social security and Medicare, and we've gotta report that quarterly. It's like an informational type of form, similar to a form 1040 on the individual side of things. It should be just an information form, meaning we're not gonna pay any tax or get a refund because unlike the 1040, the income taxes, it should be more of like a flat tax on these. So we should be able to have paid the proper amount of tax, and this is just an information return to verify that we have done so. Most companies have to do that on a quarterly basis, but if you have limited payroll, you might not need to do it quarterly. And then you've got the 940, which is the yearly reporting, and that's the employer's annual federal unemployment, or FUTA, and a lot of people, you would think that that would be summarizing your 941s, but it's actually different. It summarizes to some degree the earnings, but this is for the federal unemployment, which is a different kind of tax. It's an employer-only tax, and you only have to report on it for the year-end reporting on the 940. And then, of course, you also have the W-2s that you have to issue, and you've got the W-3 that's a summary of all the W-2s. So those reports are quite nice to have, you're gonna want help with them typically, and usually the software, if you have the payroll turned on, part of a big benefit is they're gonna help you to process these forms, the 940s, the 941s, and the W-2s and W-3. So that's the general process with the payroll. If you've got payroll turned on within the accounting system, then you'll be working over here in the payroll area, where you have the employees, so you've got your employees here, and you'd be processing the payroll through here. I won't go into a lot of detail in that process, but.