Can you deduct auto insurance from payroll and put in another account

Hi there lauratabinski,

It's awesome to hear that you're working with, or considering working with, QuickBooks Online Payroll. Knowing what the program can handle and how to go about recording deductions is an important step to take. I'm here to help.

In QuickBooks Online Payroll, it's possible to set up a number of different kinds of deductions, so whether it can accommodate your auto insurance deduction is going to depend on how you need to set it up. To get started, check out our Supported pay types and deductions explained article, which goes into detail about what the program can work with. It may also mean, however, doing some testing in product to check out deduction setups and how they'll record.

This can be done in two ways. Deductions can be set up on an employee profile and also in your Payroll settings which you can then later add to the relevant employees. Through the Payroll settings, the steps would go as follows.

1. Select the Gear icon.
2. Choose Payroll settings.
3. Click Deductions / Contributions.
4. Click Add a New Deduction/Contribution.
5. Add the Category, Type, and Description.
6. Click OK to save.
7. The program will then ask if you'd like to apply it to employees. Click Yes if you do.
8. Select the employee on the next page.
9. Click Edit employee.
10. Click Add new deduction/contribution for the question Does [employee] have any deductions or contributions? (ex. retirement, health care).
11. Choose the deduction.
12. Click Done.

If you'd like to try setting up the deduction through the employee profile instead, which offers you the opportunity to see what fields it hits on payroll forms, you can go to the Payroll tab, choose the Employees section, and then the steps are the same from step 8 onward above.

The other great thing about QuickBooks Online Payroll is that you have the chance to tell the program how you'd like payroll items to be organized into different accounts. Depending on how you set up your deduction, you may be able to specify a particular account it goes into in the Payroll settings' Accounting section. Here's an article that goes over that: Payroll set up: Payroll preferences

Feel free to give that a go and see if it'll work out the way you're looking for. If not, I recommend submitting feedback to our product development team about it and seeing if there's another way that'll work to track this amount. If you have interest in new features added to QuickBooks Online, keep an eye on the following page, which is updated quarterly: QuickBooks Online Feature and Product Updates

Wishing you the best!