QuickBooks Payroll ServiceThe payroll screens in an order that holds.

The product is yours, and the order is ours

QuickBooks is Intuit's product. We are not Intuit, we do not speak for them, and the screens can move between the day this page was written and the morning you open them. What does not move is the order that keeps a company out of trouble. Legal name and federal number first, matching the formation papers. State wage account next. Pay schedule after you know which days you can fund. People after the schedule, not before, so a hire is not floating in a company that cannot pay. Tax deposits and the question of who files Form 941 and Form 940 before any click that moves money.

Owners who start with the employee screen are usually trying to be kind to someone who is waiting. Kindness that skips the account number creates a paycheck the state cannot see. We would rather you tell the person the date slipped by a few days. A late honest start beats an early invisible one.

Settings people skip because they look like fine print

The deposit schedule, monthly or semiweekly, is not a style choice. Publication 15 is where you read which one you are, before the year. The software may ask you to pick. Picking without the publication is how a company deposits on the wrong weeks and then meets a failure-to-deposit letter that feels personal. It is not personal. It is a setting.

Direct deposit needs your bank to agree, and the agreement is yours. We do not hold the bank login. A test deposit, if the provider offers one, is worth doing before a real Friday. A Friday that fails in front of a crew is a long Friday. Ten minutes on a Wednesday is cheaper, even though nobody writes poems about test deposits.

Benefits, garnishments, and time off change the summary and the W-2. They are your decisions. We want them named before the first live draft so the summary we later tie to the bank includes them. A garnishment discovered after three paydays is a conversation with a person who is already angry, and with a balance the books never showed.

Where we stop in the software

We stop when you can sign in, see the roster, see the next draft date, and name who files the quarter. The button that pays people is the button we do not press. If a call drifts toward "can you just run this one," the answer is no, including the week of a fair or a market or a storm. One exception becomes the job. The job of running payday belongs to you or to the provider in the contract, not to this practice.

If the software and a separate payroll company are both in the story, we pick one path and turn the other off for wages. Two paths are how a person gets paid twice or reported twice. Twice is not a generous mistake. It is a cleanup.

Bring a screenshot of the screen you are stuck on, with account numbers covered. We can usually tell from the screen whether you are early in the order or about to press the click that should wait.

A stuck screen, read from the top

When a screen will not let you continue, read the red line before you hunt for a workaround. Most blocks are a missing federal number, a pay schedule with no date, or a bank account the provider has not verified. Filling a later screen to get past the block just hides the hole. Write down the exact words of the block, cover any account number, and send that. We can usually tell whether you are one field from ready or three steps early.

The same patience applies to employees you add just to see the screen. A fake person in the roster becomes a real W-2 problem if a draft is ever approved by accident. Use your own name if you must see the path, and only when the company form actually requires your wage. Delete nothing in a panic. A deleted test that was actually a hire is worse than a test left in place until we look together.

After the path is clear, write the next three draft dates on paper and put the paper where you approve hours. The software will remind you. The paper is for the week the reminder goes to a person who is out. A payday that depends on one inbox is a payday with one point of failure, and that point is usually on vacation when the draft is due.