QuickBooks Payroll ServiceWhat has to exist before anyone is paid.

The company has to exist before the number does

Owners often start at the paycheck screen because that is the screen with a button. The IRS employer-number page starts earlier. Register the legal entity with the state first, then apply in the business name as it appears on the formation papers. The number is free. The page also says one application a day is the limit, and that a nominee is not the person who applies. We sit on that call with you. We do not invent a second application because the first hour felt slow.

A storm afternoon does not pause a wage account. If the papers are ready while the shop is closed early, the application still gets made that day, and it does not get made twice. The IRS employer-number page says one application a day is the limit. Weather is not a second application, and a slow hour is not a reason to start over under a slightly different name.

The folder for a person, before the money moves

Publication 583 says the employer and the employee both complete Form I-9, and it points onward for the form itself. We stop where that publication stops. Employment tax records, the same publication says, are kept at least four years after the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later. A folder that lives in a truck cab for a month and then disappears is not a folder we will call ready.

A W-4 belongs in that same folder when the person is an employee. The state then wants a new-hire report on the deadline its own employer page publishes, and the report is required when a W-4 is required. The quarterly wage report is a different piece of paper. Filing one does not excuse the other. People discover this in January, which is a miserable month to learn a rule that was already in force on the first day of wages. Read the state's page for the number of days. Do not borrow a number from a blog that froze one state's rule and called it national.

Direct deposit, the tax held back, and the provider login all belong to you. Our part is to see that those three exist and that you can open them without us. A morning that ends with our name on the login is a morning that went too far.

A made-up shop, so the order is visible

Picture a bakery that is not a client and not a real company. The owner has a signed formation document on a Tuesday and a cousin who can start on Friday. Tuesday is for the federal number, in the bakery's own name. Wednesday is for the state wage account and for picking a provider the owner can sign into. Thursday is the W-4, the I-9, and the new-hire report dated from Friday, the day wages will start. Friday can be a paycheck only if Tuesday through Thursday actually happened. The cousin's state is whichever state the bakery employs the cousin in. The order of the four days does not change because the bakery sits in a different state from the practice.

If Friday arrives with none of that, the kind thing is to pay the cousin late and say so, not to run a paycheck out of a personal account and hope the year will absorb it. Personal-account pay is how a wage becomes invisible. Invisible wages are how a return starts an argument with the owner in March.

We will tell you if Friday is realistic. Sometimes it is, when the papers are already in hand. Sometimes the honest sentence is that the cousin starts the following Wednesday. Either sentence is more useful than a button pressed in a panic.

What you can hold in one hand that afternoon

A finished morning leaves three things on the table. The federal confirmation with the company name spelled the way the formation papers spell it. The state account number written beside the provider you can open yourself. And a folder for the first person, with the start date of wages on the front, not the date of the interview. If one of those three is a promise instead of a paper, Friday is not a payday yet.

We keep a copy of the list, not a copy of the login. You leave with the papers. The cousin hears a date that the papers can support. That is the whole kindness of the week.