Recording a paycheck to a home employee

Holidaze

I use Quicken Classic for Windows. We have need of a home employee for the first time. We have set up a payroll service. I would like to track the gross paycheck, all the deductions, and net amount related to the employee for each paycheck. I would also like to track our state and federal obligations for each paycheck.

We do not operate a business so there is no need to switch to QuickBooks or some other more powerful application. This just needs to be tracked for a single individual.

Is there a way to do this in Quicken Classic for Windows?

Thanks.

NotACPA

Since you'll be getting the appropriate numbers from the payroll service, look into Scheduled Transactions.

Holidaze

Thanks for the reply. Scheduled Transactions I'm familiar with and will likely set that up. The real question I have is how to set up the splits so they accumulate by payment/deduction during the year so at the end of the reporting period I have a total I can use for tax payments/reporting.

For example (making all these numbers up for ease of discussion, not accuracy):

The gross payment is $1,000.00
FIT is $100.00
Medicare is $100.00
State Tax is $100.00
State Uninsured is $100.00
Net is $600.00

I'd like to be able to report on the Gross, FIT, Medicare, State Tax, State Uninsured, and Net amounts separately.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

RalphC

I would set up the Categories that you listed and append the name of the employee (i.e. Gross Paycheck-Jane Doe, FIT-Jane Doe, etc.). Give them the appropriate Tax Line Item. You'll be able to run selective reports on these categories for tax reporting purposes and payroll taxes.

As @NotACPA advises, make the payroll transaction a Scheduled Transaction or Reminder because your split will have all these categories in it.

NotACPA

In the split transaction, Gross amount will be a positive number. The various deductions are negative numbers, leaving the net amount … which is what actually appears as the amount of the check in your account register.

splasher

Rather then adding the name to the category, I'd use a Tag for the name, that way when this employee leaves and you get a new employee, you don't have to create new categories, all you have to do is create another Tag and change the scheduled transactions.

With the Tags, you could run the report for a single Tag and have all the appropriate information in the report.

QuickUserPSP

@Holidaze would it make sense to set up each of the deduction categories as an account on Quicken and then transfer the deduction amounts to the appropriate account each pay period? That way you could easily determine how much you would need to remit at the end of the year and keep track of it during the year.

Holidaze

@QuickUserPSP that was the direction I was thinking of but wanted to see if any long-time users had a better idea. Thanks!