QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Doing Payroll

If you run a one-person shop, like a sole proprietorship or a small Subchapter S corporation, you can withdraw money from the company for your personal use without fussing over payroll. However, to take advantage of retirement savings options like a Simplified Employee Pension (SEP), you have to pay yourself a salary.

You can process payroll on your own and add transactions to QuickBooks for the payroll tax payments you make to federal and state government agencies. But, if you decide to outsource the headaches of payroll to a payroll-service company (as many businesses do), you simply use the values from the payroll reports you get from the service to fill out a couple of transactions for each payroll in QuickBooks—to allocate salaries and wages, payroll taxes, and any other payroll expenses to the accounts in your chart of accounts. For a small payroll, outside services are a pretty good deal. The payroll service takes care of all the grunt work for the equivalent of the cost of a few hours of your time. This chapter explains how to pay yourself without payroll, record do-it-yourself payroll transactions, or record the payroll transactions processed by a payroll-service company.

If you want to process payroll in QuickBooks, you first have to sign up for one of the payroll services that Intuit offers. To keep expenses low, you can choose a bare-bones service that provides only updated tax tables. At the other end of the spectrum, you can opt for QuickBooks’ ...