Manual payroll

Hi Theresa222,

It's important you're able to record your payroll entries in QuickBooks. I'd be happy to show you how to do that manually. 

In order to use any of the payroll features (running and Unscheduled Pay Run), you'd need to have an active subscription. You'd have to run your payroll outside of QuickBooks and then record it manually using a Journal Entry. Journal entries are a good way to record the accounting information for your payroll in QuickBooks Online if you are not using our payroll service. I encourage you to check out the instructions outlined in this helpful article: Record payroll transactions manually.

Let me know if you questions. I'm here to help. 

Hello @Theresa222 ,

You won't lose any historical data.  For example, if you go to a pay cheque that was previously created in QB payroll, that cheque is not going to go away.  But you cannot use any of the payroll functionality from now on without the subscription.

You will likely have to use https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/e-services-businesses/payroll-deductions-online-calculator.html to calculate your payroll deductions, and then use a journal entry to enter your entire payroll in a lump sum, or you can enter several lines on each paycheque to cover all the entries you need to make.

When I do manual payroll, I create a journal entry for each employee, for which the net pay goes to an Employee Wages Payable liability account.  Then when I write the cheques, I post that net amount to Employee Wages Payable liability account.  An example:

When it comes time to do payroll remittances, the balance in your CRA Payable (or similarly named) liability account will be the amount of your remittance.

If you are recording your payroll details in some other type of sub-ledger in Excel or similar, you can make the same journal entry for the total of all the payroll and then write your individual cheques against the Employee Wages Payable account to bring it to $0.00 each pay run.

The manual process is a bit clunky compared to the payroll subscription, but it works.  When I was doing manual payroll I used a little payroll utility called Wintax.  For $125 per year, it will handle all your payroll calculations, as well as print out CRA Remittance reports, and T4's at year end.  Or, it also has a free online payroll deductions calculator, much like CRA's but a little nicer.  The only thing the free version can't do (that I can find) is calculate any Vacation accruals - you would have to keep that record elsewhere.  https://www.hrclub.ca/main/default.aspx

Other than that, you just use the numbers generated out of the payroll software to make your journals entries into QB.

Good luck!