 QuickBooks Online 2023 payroll settings and account mapping. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our Get Great Guitars practice file. We started up in a prior presentation using the 30-day free trial. We also have opened the free QuickBooks Online sample company. If you want the two open at the same time, we suggest using the incognito window or another browser. You can open the incognito window if using Google Chrome by selecting the three dots in the browser. Open the incognito window and type into the search engine QuickBooks Online Test Drive. We'll be using the sample company to compare the difference between the accounting view, the view Get Great Guitars is in, and the business view, the view that the sample company is in. You can change between the two views by selecting the cog up top and the changing of the views on down below. We're going to open up a couple tabs to put reports in like we do every time. Right click in the tab up top to duplicate it. Right click in the duplicated tab to duplicate it again. We're going to go back to the tab to the middle so we can go to the reports on the left and open up then one of our faves that being the balance sheet report. Note that if you're in the business view by the way the reports are located in the business overview and then the reports then we're going to tab to the to the right and then open up the reports again this time the P to the L the profit to the loss with the other favorite close up the boogie do the change of the range from 010123 tab 123123 tab run it to refresh it tab to the middle close the boogie scrolling up like we do every time and go from 010123 tab 123123 tab run it to refresh it that's the setup process that we do every time. Now in prior presentations we set up the payroll and then we process the first month of payroll and you can see the accounts that are impacted on down below it put the liability accounts into this one account for the liabilities these are the withholdings and our taxes withheld but not yet paid to the government and then on the income statement side of things it put the the expense side in this account called wages and then the taxes now you might have a question in terms of how might I want to map these items differently and and we'll also take a look at some other kind of payroll settings that are up in the cog up top so in other words you might be saying hey look I have some people I would like to map to one payroll account possibly as salaried employees and then another payroll account for non salaried employees so maybe you want multiple payroll accounts depending on department or whether they're salary or not how can we map these to different accounts on the liability side you might say hey look I would like to be breaking out not in this format I want to break out my federal taxes between the social security and the and the medicare for whatever reason and the federal income tax into separate accounts so I can see them one at a time maybe that makes it a little bit easier for you to tie out to your to your 941s or something like that maybe you want to see the employee versus the employer taxes broken out into different accounts or something like that then we can go into the settings up top to look at that mapping now note this is a little bit different than the desktop version if you're used to the desktop version we've got the the payroll items that we we can kind of adjust here a lot of our payroll settings will be up in the cog up top so you'll recall we we we kind of turned on payroll just to recap on the left hand side you have to buy payroll if you're going to process payroll in quickbooks your other option is to hire a third party payroll provider have them do all the kind of tedious stuff on payroll and you just enter into the system what's needed for the financial statements and to do the bank reconciliations otherwise if you're doing it within quickbooks then you're going to be processing the payroll within here and then there's some other settings up top that are up in the cog and then we can go to the payroll settings let's just go through these payroll settings one of them is going to be that mapping kind of issue that we talked about and we'll get down to that down below okay so you got your general item so you've got your general information up top so this is the info you used when you applied for the e in so if you're doing payroll from an IRS perspective you need another number that's a that's an employee identification number that's a number that's not just necessary for doing payroll per se or you might not want it just because you have employees you might want it even if you're a sole proprietor you being the only only person doing work in the business so that you can give that number to others possibly if they need it for 1099 reporting purposes instead of giving your social security number then of course the company type down here is going to be important sole proprietor versus other formats so that they can process the proper payroll it should populate you would think automatically there because we entered that information in the company settings when we set up you know the general company settings and then you've got your federal tax i'm going to close this out hitting the the little um the little pencil so you can find what you need in the letter tax notices so employer identification number so this is an e in that's provided to us when we file for the e i n so you're going to need that information as the employer identification number this is the format of it they've got the application here if you want to apply directly for it if you don't have that and so that's going to be how often do I file and pay taxes form 941 paying semi-weekly cents so you can edit which which payroll tax form do you file so you've got your 941 each quarter 943 each year now note that most of the time people file the 941 because that's quarterly filing so it's it's kind of like reporting your 1040s on an individual it's an information form but instead of wanting it yearly they usually want it quarterly but if you have if you fall under a certain threshold or you have agriculture you might have a different form 943 or form 944 which is a yearly form so if you have minimal payroll then possibly the IRS isn't going to require the quarterly reporting but just the yearly reporting so so we got we've got the quarterly here so how often you file and pay your taxes so we're going to be filing uh taxes either quarterly monthly semi-weekly so we're going to say we're going to be doing it let's say monthly uh effective date let's just say 1 1 2 2 and then form payment schedules form 941 semi-weekly uh current schedule I'm going to keep that basically as is because we ran that and I don't think well let's go ahead and save this hopefully and then the next item on our list you got the California taxes now this is of course specific to a particular state so I'm not going to go into detail with it but some states are going to have similar they're going to line up their payroll obligations to similar to the Fed and other states are going to be doing something different with payroll possibly not having the payroll taxes but collecting their taxes for state obligations some other way and then we've got the auto payroll so enroll eligible employees you want to pay automatically uncheck employees to remove them from auto pay so when you select save changes you allow into it to debit the total payroll you owe for all enrolled employees each pay period from cash account will leave auto payroll on until you tell us to turn it off so you've got your auto payroll I'm just going to leave it as is for the purposes of the practice problem and try to process the payroll on the second month because we'll just do two months of payroll here so taxes and forms so if we go into the taxes and forms here you got the auto taxes and forms is on that's the default will automatically pay and file your file your federal state payroll taxes including year-end filing beginning with tax period ending on or after and so on so hopefully if that should work well and it'll automatically process that and that should be an easy thing to do if everything is set up and running properly federal form preferences let's go into that one do you want to let an employee a third party prepare or or someone else discuss your tax returns with the IRS well that will add this info to federal form 941 944 940 so you can add someone or not here right and then you could put the third parties so if you have someone like a CPA or something or an accountant then you can add them there this is a question basically on these forms that are the payroll forms and then pay preparer do you use a pay preparer for gate rate guitars federal tax returns i will add this info to the federal 941 this only applies to forms you file manually so generally we're going to say no because we are not having a paid preparer because we're paying quickbooks in essence to give us the information so that we could file it ourselves so closing that out and then we've got the federal form preferences let's go into that so do you want to let employees i already did that i did that one that one's done that's done dishes are done dude okay that's in a movie i think i don't i can't remember federal form preferences i did that so email notifications so if i go into the email notifications you've got your email address set notifications send to you form filing notifications so you're going to get your email payday notifications and so on so i typically would keep the the defaults to get that information payday notifications on send same day submission do send day before so you have an option to get it on or before tax payment reminders so those are your reminder settings let's go to the next one email profile management so going into that one let employees edit their info in workforce we'll send you an email when any changes are made so they can possibly make the changes remember that we entered the data into the system based on their w2 form and we had the option of i mean sorry their w4 form and we had the option of basically sending them an email and letting them make the changes based on their w4 form our responsibility is to take the information that they gave us and then file the withholdings or do the withholdings in accordance with the law based on that information our obligation is not generally to give them tax advice right we're just facility we're just the collect tax collecting mechanism with regards to payroll taxes they got to give us the information to do so which is the w4 form which hopefully they can they can basically give to us automatically you know into quickbooks on their end which would be great shared data so here's our shared data allow employees to import w2 data into uh turbo tax so turbo tax is owned by by uh into it the same owner of quickbooks so if you can get so you know they're trying to do some integration between making it easier to go from the taxes to filing the bookkeeping to filing the taxes and the w2s and stuff it's that integration is not perfect to me yet but i mean if they can improve it that would be great i i check in on it from time to time to see to see if i think it's uh how effective it is but connect your bank and send money with quickbooks to use direct deposit to pay your workforce as well as e-file and e-pay your taxes you need to connect your bank account so you got your bank account for the direct pay stuff which will will not get into at this point and then we've got uh employee profile so let employees editor we did that shared data and then bank accounts something that's not quite right with your bank accounts i'm not going to go into that printing so something is not quite right with it give us a few minutes to try again and then let's do let's go into the accounting here we're going to go into the accounting and so now we have the paycheck and payroll payments so this if i go into this it's going to be coming out of our checking account now note like sometimes i you might set up another account just for payroll and it's kind of tedious to do that but it could be it could be a little bit easier if there's an issue so you kind of and why it's a little bit more tedious is that you might set it up an account that you're going to transfer money out of your checking account into the payroll account just to cover payroll and then process the payroll checks out of payroll so that's a little tedious why would you do that because then all of your payroll checks are just in one place and the problem with them having them all in the checking account is that it's a little bit more difficult to kind of manage what happened with payroll it's a little bit easier if you because there's so much stuff going on in the cash account it has more transactions than any other account so if you make a transfer out of your cash account just to cover the payroll and then pay the payroll out of it then if there's an issue you can look at the payroll cat checking account and it'll only have payroll transactions which might make it a little bit easier to figure out what's going on but we're taking it out of the checking account here wage so there's here's where you can change your wages so where do you track employee wages and your quick post chart of accounts so which account do we want them to go to we could say all employees wages are posted to one expense account that's what we currently have and then we chose the expense account down here of wages now if you don't like wages you could change the name to whatever you want to change in the chart of accounts like we talked about before it's just pointing to like a normal account which is a sub account on uh the gl so we're just selecting the account that we want there but each employee wages are posted to their own expense account so if you go to this item now i can go to each of these employees and if i want them going to some different account one possibly salary one possibly wages or non-salary one possibly from one department like sales the other from the administration department you can do that and breaking it out that way each employee's wages are posted to different types of accounts salary contractor and so on so you can get into more detail there so we're going to keep it the way it was but there's your options you're going to close that back out and then you've got the employer taxes let's check that out so where do you track employer taxes that you've paid expenses in your quick book so now we're talking about the taxes that we match not the taxes pulled out of the employee check but our taxes now quick books online rightly now breaks it out into its own account by default which is the taxes payroll uh expense taxes again if you want to change the name or something then you can go into just the gl and change the name and map it to the same area if you so choose so that's nice by default you could have employer taxes are posted to different expense accounts for different employees that's less likely that you're going to do that but maybe you have your taxes like as part of cost of goods sold if you're a construction company and you want to have them in cost of goods sold as opposed to in other expenses or something like that and for certain employees versus other employee taxes are posted to different expenses and so on we're going to keep the default the default is good for our purposes so there's those two and then the liabilities if i go into that one you've got the federal taxes now this is on the liability side so this is the default account so if i go into that's the account that it's going to again you could change the account if you want to call it something different you could just call it payroll liabilities or so on and maybe you don't need all three forms right because they're trying to cover every form that you might have if you're just doing 941s maybe you just put you change the name of the account in the chart of accounts to just 941 uh liability there possibly and then they're breaking out the federal unemployment into its own its own place here that's the futa which we didn't do because it's kind of small and we don't want to make things overly complicated but it's going to its own account maybe you don't want to do that maybe you want to group them all into one account you could you could put them into one account but generally that's a pretty good setup because you know these are all these are all the social security medicare which is our like fica kind of taxes employee and employer portion that are all going to one place and then this one's kind of a different tax it has a different form the 940 so if you're trying to tie this out to your 941s then they're all kind of in one account here and if you're trying to tie this out to the 940 it'll be in another gl account notice you don't have as much leeway to break this out this way into like if i just wanted the nine the the the to break this side out into like employer versus employee or the medicare versus the social security you actually have more flexibility to do that kind of thing in the desktop version but this is a pretty good setup so it works fine for my per the anything i've seen that's usually the way you'd want it to go and then you got your california stuff which i won't get into because again that's kind of state specific and so employer employer taxes liabilities and then you've got your class tracking so class tracking if you want to if you turned on the class tracking that's where you can break out your income statement by class and run reports by class update existing transactions update accounting preferences for past transactions according to the current preferences so in other words if you made a change to like these accounts then you gotta say do you want that change to be to be taking place retroactively and and so that all of your accounts for the entire year usually you would want to be reflecting the same right you know you wouldn't want your accounts to be split up for half the year and not split up for half the year you would think between two wage accounts or something you would want it to be adjusting retroactively to prior payrolls posted generally you would think all right so we didn't really change anything here but the idea is that there's our added payroll settings one of those payroll settings being a place where you can adjust your liability account so obviously you can adjust these liability accounts and map them differently and then if you just want to change the name to these liability accounts then you can just go to the chart of accounts which is on the left hand side accounting chart of accounts and then you can just edit edit your accounts down here on those wages accounts so the wages accounts are way down here the wages accounts are way down where are they found it there they are so you can just edit this if you wanted to if you wanted to call it payroll account or something and maybe you don't want sub accounts although I think they work quite well and so maybe you want to call this one uh uh payroll taxes instead of just taxes under the sub account so you can shake me you can make those changes and that's fine because the the mapping is going to this particular account if you want to have two accounts impacted you have to add the two accounts and then change the mapping to be mapping to those two accounts based on the two employees or something like that all right that's the general idea uh if you were in the business view by the way that is located under the bookkeeping the gl that is and then the chart of accounts I mean not the gl there it's under the bookkeeping so there it is no changes so we won't open the trial balance or anything because it should be the same like it was last time and so we'll continue next time