n-How to Print Pay Stubs in QuickBooks (Right After You Run Payroll)
After you run payroll, go to Payroll, then Employees, open the pay run you just submitted, and select Print pay stubs. Choose which employees to include and send it to your printer, or export to PDF if you're handing them out digitally. This covers the normal printing step for a payroll run you just processed; pulling up an older stub later is a separate action, covered in the FAQ below.
The full walkthrough
1. Finish running payroll first. Pay stubs only exist once a payroll run has actually been submitted and processed; you can't print one for a check that hasn't been created yet.
2. Go to the paycheck list. Under Payroll, then Employees, you'll find the paycheck list showing recent pay runs, grouped by pay date.
3. Open the pay run. Click into the specific pay period you want stubs from.
4. Select the employees you need. You can print for everyone in that run at once, or check off just the ones you need right now.
5. Choose Print pay stubs. This generates a PDF formatted for printing, with the standard breakdown of gross pay, each deduction, taxes withheld, and net pay.
6. Print or distribute. Send it to a printer, or save and email the PDF if an employee just needs a digital copy rather than a paper one.
Where this becomes a recurring interruption
Printing stubs for a payroll run you just processed is quick. The actual time sink is usually what happens after: an employee asks for a copy later for a loan application, or HR needs one for a reference check, and someone has to stop what they're doing, dig through old pay runs, and regenerate it on demand.
QuickBooks Online Payroll does have a self-service option: employees can get their own stubs through QuickBooks Workforce without asking anyone, which removes a chunk of this if it's turned on and employees actually know about it. It doesn't help with requests that come through HR or a manager instead of the employee going straight to Workforce themselves.
Payroll documentation requests follow a predictable pattern once you look at them, but they rarely get treated as something worth automating, just a string of one-off interruptions someone handles as they come in.
What we've built on top of QuickBooks payroll documentation
Self-service stub requests routed automatically
A request for a pay stub or earnings letter, whether it comes from an employee or a manager on their behalf, gets routed and generated automatically instead of landing in HR's inbox as an interruption.
Stubs attached to the record that needed them
When a stub is pulled for a specific purpose, a loan application, a reference check, it gets attached directly to that record automatically, so nobody's hunting for the same document twice.
Who's actually asking for pay stubs after the fact in your business?
Employees, HR, a lender, someone else entirely: tell us who's asking and how often, and we'll tell you if the request can handle itself.
Printing pay stubs on request more often than you'd like?
Tell us who's asking for them, and why, and we'll tell you whether that request can run itself end to end. Pay stub requests are one example of a recurring interruption; the same question applies to anything else that keeps landing on someone's desk the same way every time.
Let's talk