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A QuickBooks Manual Payroll is an option provided in QuickBooks Desktop only and not in QuickBooks online. In todays growing world, many small businesses are emerging who have few employees. They are unable to afford payroll subscription and hence look ways to set up payroll manually in QuickBooks. Also, manual payroll can be set up irrespective of the fact that the user already has a QuickBooks payroll online subscription.

This article will provide a detailed study about how to set up and use payroll manually in QuickBooks Desktop.

How to enable payroll manually in QuickBooks Desktop?

If a user is having few employees and is not willing to spend huge payroll subscription cost, then you can even enable payroll manually in QuickBooks Desktop. It is a cost-effective technique for small businesses.

Follow these steps to Setup Quickbooks payroll manual:

Point on the QuickBooks Bar and click on Help. Then, select QuickBooks Desktop Help.

Type calculate payroll manually and search for the manual setup article.

Numerous topic series will be displayed by QuickBooks help. Click on the topic: Calculating payroll taxes manually(without a subscription to QuickBooks payroll).

The topic window gets opened and the user should read it thoroughly. Intuit mentions a clause there that it takes no liability for any improper calculations if a user uses manual payroll processing.

At the end of the information, the user will find a small paragraph that says set your company file to use the manual payroll calculations setting . Click on the manual payroll calculations link and it will take you to another window.

The help window which gets opened will ask you that whether you are sure to set up your company file to use manual calculations? At the end of the window, locate the words in blue mentioning set my company file to use manual calculations. For proceeding further, click on the words.

A message box gets opened up by QuickBooks advising that You must now calculate and enter your paycheck amounts manually. If you currently have an active QuickBooks Payroll Service Subscription, you must call the Intuit Payroll Service to cancel your subscription and avoid future changes.

To proceed further, Click OK. Manual payroll processing has been activated now.

How to use manual payroll in QuickBooks Desktop?

The steps for using the manual payroll are listed below.

After the activation of manual payroll, a user needs to turn on the payroll preferences.

Click on Edit > Select Preferences > Select Payroll and Employees > Select Company Preferences. These steps are followed only when you have not used QuickBooks payroll even once.

Payroll items will be added to the List Menu. Now a user has access to the same type of payroll item functionality that subscription users basically use.

It has one exception that all the figures such as tax figures will be entered by the user.

Payroll checks and other functionality which were turned off in the users QuickBooks file can now be used by him.

Note: At least one employee needs to be set up for activating actual paychecks feature under Pay employees.

Now a user can set up payroll items and employees. You can process payroll and payroll taxes in the same way you would operate the payroll subscription.

Payroll tax items will generally remain constant in some cases, so for the current rates, you need to check your tax tables.

In other cases, you need to calculate the tax to be applied while processing paychecks with the help of formulas or your paper tax tables.

In every case, you will want to confirm and/or enter and verify the accuracy of tax calculations you enter into respective boxes.

With manual payroll, a user cannot prepare or print payroll tax forms.