 Remember that payroll is something that you have the option as to whether you want to pay more to process the payroll within QuickBooks or process payroll with a third-party provider. There's pros and cons in both of those formats of the payroll. We were able to turn on the payroll for the free as part of the free 30-day trial so we're going to be testing out the payroll within the system. So if I go into the payroll we're now in the payroll center and if we're in the other view by the way the payroll is down here as well we have a similar tab in the business view. Now if I take a quick look at our flow chart here just to think about the process of payroll what we did is we set up the payroll and that's the first thing we've got to get going because the payroll taxes could differ based on the location and we have to pay more to get the payroll set up within the QuickBooks online software. Then if we're tracking time within the system we can enter the time into the system although that's not a requirement for all payroll because you might be tracking the time outside of the system in another program or an excel spreadsheet or you might just be paying salary and then we're going to be paying the employees which is what we're going to do now which you can basically think of as like a check type of form because at the end of the day it's going to be a form decreasing the checking account however they're going to be multiple check forms depending on how many people were paying and they're going to be some of the most complex checks in terms of journal entries because we're going to have to calculate the gross pay the withholdings which we're going to focus on just the mandatory federal tax withholdings social security medicare and federal income tax although you could also have the benefits to be withheld such as a 401k plan health insurance and you could also have state obligations as well both require you know required obligations for state taxes the processing of the payroll as we saw when we set up could be on a weekly basis bi-weekly semi-monthly or monthly basis and then of course those withholdings that we took from the employees and the employer taxes would have to be paid and that would be the next step on the payroll liabilities and then we have to file information reporting forms which would be the 941s on a quarterly basis 940s at the end of the years w2 at the end of the year and w3 at the end of the year so now we're in this step processing the payroll now note that if you were doing this through a third-party provider then they would be processing the payroll and handling by hr typically meaning they're going to track all the taxes not only on a aggregate basis but on a year to date basis a per employee basis and a year to date versus a current paycheck basis that's a lot of data to kind of process and so that's why it could be beneficial to either do it within quickbooks where you're going to have all that information or by a third-party provider in which case you could just pull in the summary data into the system to get your financial statements correct and use the third-party provider to have all the detailed information