Books / payroll
Payroll, payables and receivables in Waldorf, MD
Pay runs processed in QuickBooks Payroll, with the bills you owe and the invoices owed to you kept in the same set of books. Remote, for Maryland and DC.
Chapter 01
Where payroll goes wrong in a small business
Payroll rarely fails dramatically. It fails by drift. A run goes out a day late because the person who normally does it was on a job site. A worker is paid as a contractor when the arrangement looks more like employment. A quarterly filing sits on someone's to-do list past its due date. None of these is hard to avoid on its own, but each one creates work later, and the people it lands on are your employees, who notice a wrong paycheck faster than anyone.
Payroll is also tied to the rest of the books. If wages are posted by hand, or payroll liabilities are never matched to what was actually paid, the profit and loss shows a business that does not exist. Running payroll and bookkeeping together, by one person who sees both, is how the two stay in agreement.
Sealed pay envelopes in a wooden tray beside a torn pay stub and a fountain pen
How a pay run is processed in QuickBooks Payroll
Amy Guiriansoro is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in QuickBooks Payroll, and that is where runs are processed. Hours or salary figures come in from you on your schedule, whether weekly, every two weeks or twice a month. They are entered, then reviewed against the previous run so that a stray extra zero or a missing employee is caught before anyone is paid.
Once you approve the run, it is processed and pay stubs are produced for each employee. The payroll tax filings that follow from the run are prepared in the same system, so they are tied to the figures that were actually paid. Setup is handled once, with employees, pay rates, deductions and schedules entered carefully, and changes such as a raise or a new hire are handled as they come up, not discovered at year end.
Chapter 03
Year end, W-2s and the money in and out around payroll
At the end of the year the work is mostly already done, because every run was recorded as it happened. W-2s are prepared from those records, and the payroll file is left in a state your tax preparer can use without having to reconstruct anything. For a business in Waldorf with a handful of employees, that turns what is often a scramble in January into a short, orderly step.
Payables and receivables sit in the same practice for a reason. Bills are entered, scheduled and paid on the dates you choose, so vendors are paid without cash being drawn down early. Invoices to your customers are tracked until they are collected, and a regular look at what is overdue shows you where cash is stuck. It is the same set of books throughout, which is why payroll, payables and receivables here are handled together with your monthly bookkeeping where you want that.
Amy Guiriansoro, Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Payroll. Call (301) 848-6619.