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First, my apoligies if I'm on the wrong board. Please point me to the right site.

I have a 1 person S-Corp in California and use Paychex for the payroll. I simply want to enter the data into QuickBooks manually and am looking for a tutorial/example. Everything on QuickBooks seems geared towards, "pay for automation", or "go to bookkeeper", but my gut feeling is that it should not be so hard for a very simple S-corp. I have the reports from Paychex showing salary, employer social security, employee social security withheld, etc. I'm thinking that the empployer stuff can just be listed as expenses. Possibly, it must also be listed in the liability account, but I'm not sure about this. Again, mine is a simple corporation, I'm paying the salary as soon as it's due. So, I think for the employer stuff, it would just be two accounts, Expenses (possibly creating sup accounnts for Fed Expense,State Expense), and the actual bank account. I'm not really sure what, if anything, I should be doing for the money withheld from the employee check (social security, fed/state tax). Would that be a liability? How do I enter this info.

I'm sure this is a common problem and perhaps I did not make it clear how simple my question is on the QuickBook forums. I'm not looking for a automated solution or integrating PayChex w/ QuickBooks. I really just need a good explanation and tutorial explaining how to enter payroll in QuickBooks. I offer this example that I found through the QuickBooks forums: http://www.cpa911.com/read_article.asp?ID=174

Thanks, Dave

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3 Answers

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Dave, I have a similar but not exactly the same type of experience. I had a 4-8 person S-Corporation that I ran the books over about a 2 year span. We used ADP, but it's a similar service as PayChex.

You don't need to worry about the amount of the withholding in the employee's (you) check. You can make an individual account for each employee to register the expense to, or just make one account for all PayChex and leave the separation to the PayChex reporting you probably get. This really all depends on how you intend to grow and how detailed your books need to be.

Then register the amount of federal and state withholding that is paid through PayChex. I would do those in separate expense accounts. That should be it!

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Thanks for the quick response Justin, but I can't understand your response. Were you just responding to the part about how to handle the employee withholding? How do you guys handle the other (employer) expenses such as employer social security, gross pay, State Disability Insurance,etc. Again, I think someone dense like me needs a step by step example. I suspect one is out there, or there is a book describing it. Thanks again. – Dave Feb 14 '11 at 19:08
Dave, I was answering the aspect about how to handle the withholding on the employees check. The rest I hoped made sense since I am not a bookkeeper by trade. I learned how to use QuickBooks after working with my local SBDC. You listed some things like "State Disability Insurance" that I never had to deal with in VA. I had 3 expenses I tracked per employee. The amount to the employee, the amount of federal withholding, and the amount of state withholding. The details of how the withholding was separated was tracked by ADP for us, so I didn't double that info up in QuickBooks. – Justin C Feb 14 '11 at 19:20
Thanks Justin. Duly marked as answer. And thank you everyone else. -Dave – Dave Feb 16 '11 at 5:04
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You have to turn manual payroll on in quickbooks: http://www.ehow.com/how_4682603_setup-manual-payroll-quickbooks.html

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I once sat down with a quickbooks expert to help me setup and review all the setups I had done myself. This helped alot in understanding how to do entries. Local quickbook experts are available in every state and I think it is worth hiring for couple of hours.

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