n-How to Do Payroll in QuickBooks (and How to Stop Running It by Hand Every Pay Period)
Turn on a QuickBooks Payroll subscription, add your company and employees, then run payroll by entering hours, reviewing each paycheck, and submitting before your deadline. QuickBooks calculates withholding and, on paid tiers, files and pays your payroll taxes for you. Here's the full process, and what changes once you stop re-entering hours every period.
The full walkthrough
1. Turn on QuickBooks Payroll. From your QuickBooks Online dashboard, go to Payroll in the left navigation and pick a plan: Core, Premium, or Elite. Each tier adds more automatic tax filing and support, but the core run-payroll mechanics are the same across all three.
2. Add your company payroll info. Enter your EIN, state tax account numbers, and pay schedule (weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly). QuickBooks uses this to calculate the right withholding and figure out when taxes are due.
3. Add each employee. For every person you pay, enter their personal info, pay rate, W-4 details, and how they want to get paid: direct deposit or a printed check. QuickBooks Workforce lets employees fill in some of this themselves instead of you keying it all in.
4. Run payroll. Go to Payroll > Employees, select Run payroll, and choose the pay schedule you're running. For hourly employees, enter the hours; salaried employees default to their set amount unless you adjust it.
5. Review each paycheck, then submit. QuickBooks shows gross pay, deductions, and net pay for everyone on the run before you approve it. Once you submit, direct deposits get queued and checks are ready to print.
Where the hours still have to come from somewhere
Running payroll itself takes QuickBooks a few minutes once everything's set up. The real time sink is almost always upstream of that screen: pulling hours out of a time clock, a spreadsheet someone fills in, or a field service app, then retyping them into QuickBooks before you can even click Run payroll.
If your team clocks in somewhere else, a job site app, a POS, a scheduling tool, someone's translating that data by hand every single pay period. Miss a shift or fat-finger a number and it shows up as a wrong paycheck, which is a worse problem to fix after the fact than before it goes out.
QuickBooks' own Payroll feature doesn't pull hours from outside systems on its own. That's the gap: the hours exist somewhere real, they just don't arrive in QuickBooks without a person moving them there.
What we've built on top of QuickBooks payroll
Hours that land in QuickBooks on their own
Time tracked in a job site app, scheduling tool, or POS flows straight into the payroll run, so nobody's retyping a timesheet by hand before every pay period.
Pre-run checks before anyone submits
Hours or pay rates outside a normal range get flagged automatically before payroll is submitted, instead of a mistake surfacing only after a paycheck's already gone out.
What's eating time around your payroll run?
That's two examples of what this looks like. Tell us where the hours actually come from and what gets rekeyed, and we'll tell you if it can feed itself.
Still copying hours into QuickBooks by hand before every payroll run?
Tell us where those hours actually live, a time clock, a spreadsheet, a scheduling app, and we'll tell you if they can land in QuickBooks on their own. And if payroll isn't the real bottleneck, that's fine too: we automate whatever's manual in your business, payroll or otherwise.
Let's talk