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Payroll

Getting Ready for Payroll in QuickBooks Online

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Taking on your company’s payroll with QuickBooks Online? Knowing what you’re up against ahead of time will make your setup tasks much easier.

Payroll is probably the most complex element of small business accounting. Not only are you directly responsible to your employees, but you also have to make sure you’re handling everything related to benefits and payroll taxes correctly.

Whether you’re switching from a manual system to QuickBooks Online, or you’ve just hired your first employee, you’ll soon discover that the site can make your payroll-related tasks much more organized and accurate – speeding up the process tremendously.

But before you start getting ready for your first payroll run, you have a lot of setup work to be done. Be sure to [Read more…] about Getting Ready for Payroll in QuickBooks Online

Tracking Time in QuickBooks, Part 2

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We last learned about getting QuickBooks ready for time-tracking by activating it in Preferences. We also created a record for a service item. In this post, we’ll actually use that record in the two ways you’ll be using it in QuickBooks: to pay employees for their hourly work and to bill customers for services.

Recording Employee Hours

There are two ways to enter hours for your employees who provide services to customers and are paid by the hour. The first is to create a work ticket for a single activity. Click Enter Time on the home page, and then Time/Enter Single Activity to open this window:

Single-activity work tickets for employee hours are especially useful if you need to set a timer. [Read more…] about Tracking Time in QuickBooks, Part 2

Tracking Time in QuickBooks, Part 1

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If your company sells services, you can track the time spent providing them in QuickBooks.

When you sell a product to a customer, you know it. It goes away, and your inventory count in QuickBooks is reduced by one. This tracking helps you know what’s selling and what’s not, and it signals when a reorder is due.

If your business provides services to customers, though, you’re selling your employees’ time and skills. There’s no inventory count; you can sell as many hours as you have workers to fill them. Tracking time accurately and comprehensively, though, is as important as knowing how many hard drives or tote bags you’ve sold.

QuickBooks contains tools to help you record the hours employees spend doing work [Read more…] about Tracking Time in QuickBooks, Part 1

Tips on tip reporting

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If you are like millions of taxpayers who work in the service industry, you may receive tips. The tax code is clear; if you receive tips you must report them as income. Some employers have systems to make this easy, while others do not. Here are some suggestions:

Think 1-2-3

Proper tip reporting has three components.

1. Keeping a daily tip record

2. Reporting your tips to your employer

3. Recording your tips on your income tax return

Recording tip activity

Per the IRS, you can keep your tips by either maintaining a tip diary or by saving documents that show your tips. If your employer does not provide you with an electronic form of a tip diary, you can always create your own. The IRS has [Read more…] about Tips on tip reporting