How do I give an employee a cash payment but get it included as income on their paycheck?

Hi there, jana. I can assist you in recording employee’s salary via cash in QuickBooks Online (QBO). 

To begin, we can normally run a payroll for your employee for recording purposes, however, let’s make sure you’re using a paper paycheck. Let’s start documenting your employee’s cash payments by setting up additional pay items. Doing so will enable us to run payroll for your employee’s salary which was given as a cash payment.

Here’s how:

1. Go to the Payroll menu, and select Employees.
2. Select your employee whom you paid in cash.
3. From Pay types, select Start or Edit.
4. Select the pay types you want to add. If you’re unsure, please consider consulting with your accountant to know what pay type to use.
5. Enter the amount you paid to your employee.
6. You can rename some of the pay types. Select Edit ✎ next to the pay type. 
7. Select Save.

After that, you can start running your payroll by referring to this article: Create and run your payroll.

Moreover, you can also pull up a variety of payroll reports in QuickBooks. This will give you a closer look at your employee's total wages, deductions, and tax information in a certain period. For the complete list of available payroll reports and how to pull them up, kindly refer to this article: Run payroll reports.

Fill me in if you have other queries about keeping your payroll records accurate. I’ll keep this thread open for it. Take care!