Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll explore updates to QuickBooks Online Payroll. Now, you can sync classes and projects from QuickBooks Time to QuickBooks Payroll and into reports. Here's what to expect: You'll see the update in action, then hear from ProAdvisors Dan Luthi and Astrid Daniela Galvez.
Hey, ProAdvisors, I'm Jaclyn, and you are watching In the Know. It's the show designed to keep you in the know on the most exciting updates to QuickBooks Online.
So here's the scoop. We heard the hours tracked in QuickBooks—time by project, by customer, or by classes—was not flowing into payroll, creating extra work for you to allocate payroll expenses accurately and run profitability reports. So here's what we did. QuickBooks Payroll Elite and Premium customers whose employees track hours in QuickBooks Time by class or by project will now see those hours correctly allocated in run payroll. You can now split hourly, salary, and commission pay types into multiple classes and projects directly in the run payroll screen. Taxes and deductions are automatically proportionally allocated, so you can get a full picture of payroll expenses and reports. Pretty great!
And now for the Fast Facts:
- These enhancements are available to QuickBooks Online Advanced and Plus users with a QuickBooks Payroll Elite or Premium subscription.
- You can now access this new feature directly from run payroll.
- This update went live in the United States in September 2024.
If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment and subscribe.
All right. Let me introduce you now to Tiffany, so you can see the product update in action. Tiffany, welcome to the show.
Tiffany Dolan: Hi Jaclyn, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. I'm Tiffany. I've been at Intuit for a few years now and I'm very excited to be sharing with you wonderful updates about QuickBooks Online Payroll. Let me give you a quick demo.
What you would do is you would go ahead and run payroll, so I'm just going to do this right away for my employee, Scarlet Witch. You can see that the hours are here, and I have some time to approve, so I'm going to just do that, approve her time. Let's take a sneak peek at the time that she has entered. She has entered time for Tony Stark, X Men, and Guardians of the Galaxy. So you see that we have two projects, with one customer and two projects right here. I'm going to approve her time right here for this pay period, and you will see that everything flows directly into payroll, right? So, let's go back. Let's exit this. Yay. All the information has flown directly into QuickBooks Online Payroll, which is awesome. And you can see that I have some projects here; if I click on this, you will see, yeah, I have Guardians of the Galaxy and X Men. Those were the two projects. I can review my classes and projects by clicking on this button, which I'm going to do. And so for her, everything was allocated to the right projects.
And from there, I can decide, you know, to make some modifications. So let's say it wasn't 12 hours or 4 hours on X Men; everything was on Guardians of the Galaxy. So I'm just going to add this and trash this, and here we go. I can split it back, change the class, add a new class, and put it right back. So that's for Scarlet Witch, who is an hourly employee.
And now we can take a look at Nick Fury. Nick Fury, in this example, is a salaried employee. If Nick were tracking their hours in QuickBooks Time, it would also flow in, but instead of being hours, it would be a percentage. So here, as you can see, all of his salary is allocated to just class A, which is his default setting. And we can say that, okay, his project was Intuit. Lucky us. We're gonna do 50% on Intuit and 50% on class B, maybe Guardians of the Galaxy. Why not? And there we go. So here we're all done. You can see that I have two projects for him and two for her. Everyone has their classes and we're good to go.
That is how you can see classes and projects flowing from QuickBooks Time into run payroll, and everything gets then saved into payroll.
Jaclyn Anku: Tiffany, thank you so much for that demo. We'll turn now to ProAdvisors Astrid and Dan, for them to weigh in. Astrid, Dan, welcome. Thanks for being on the show.
Dan Luthi: Hey, thank you. Excited to be here.
Astrid Daniela Galvez: Hey, Jaclyn, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jaclyn Anku: Thank you. Okay, so Dan, let me kick it off with you. I'd love it if you could give the audience a little more context on how you actually use this feature in real life, and if you have any examples of the types of clients it might be helpful for.
Dan Luthi: Yeah, absolutely. I really love that it's carrying into taxes, and into the benefits and different other deductions that are coming through. We work with clients that are either in construction or doing job costing. Being able to split out your salary and your hourly employees equally across each of those pieces based on the time that's been allocated is super crucial. It gives you much more accurate job costing information, and better detail around how the business or how the events are happening and how they're performing. This is going to be really, really great news for those clients who are using time tracking in association with QuickBooks Online Payroll.
Astrid Daniela Galvez: Yes, absolutely. And as Dan was saying, this is a good feature for service-based businesses. I work as frequently with not only construction, but also landscaping and commercial cleaning service clients, and there are certain projects that do need that special allocation. What I love about it, too, is that, as you mentioned, this will really help us see the profitability reports. Cost by employee is really, really helpful for small business owners for them to budget properly and be able to see how profitable each project is based on that cost by employee. So that's super cool to see.
Jaclyn Anku: Oh, I love that this will help set you up as the advisor as well, to give them more information on where they can maybe dial up or dial down based on what the financials are showing. Astrid, would you mind hitting on how this new sync from QuickBooks Time into QuickBooks Online Payroll and reports might help save you and your team time?
Astrid Daniela Galvez: Yes, and one of the great things about this is that we don't have to modify the locations or classes manually per project. So if this is already fitting into the payroll factor, then we don't have to do those after the fact entries that we had to do in the past. So that's super helpful.
Dan Luthi: I absolutely agree with Astrid on that. I think the one part that's really exciting about it is just the time that usually it takes for you to split out that extra cost, especially if you have heavy benefits for an organization. Or if you have job specific expenses, this will allow you to be able to do it quickly and easily, and really cut down on the amount of extra hours of adjusting reports and exporting things into Excel or things along those lines. This is going to change the workflow for us as accountants, but again, that transparency for the client is going to be a huge win.
Jaclyn Anku: Well, I'm so happy to hear that being able to track classes and projects in QuickBooks Time is a game changer when it comes to being able to share financial information with your clients, and now that it saves you time because it syncs directly with payroll and on into reports. Dan and Astrid, thank you so much for being on this episode and sharing your insights with our fellow ProAdvisors.
Astrid Daniela Galvez: Thank you.
Dan Luthi: Absolutely. Thank you.
Jaclyn Anku: Thank you for watching this episode. I'm Jaclyn, host of In the Know and leader of ProAdvisor Training and Certification. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode, we'll get you next time you.
Meet the ProAdvisors
ProAdvisor Dan Luthi: partner, Ignite Spot Accounting Services
ProAdvisor Astrid Daniela Galvez: founder, Accounting Specialists and Business Solutions, LLC
