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Enhanced Payroll Center
The 'Enhanced' Payroll Center in QuickBooks 2014.
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Intuitive Accountant
Slide 1 QuickBooks 2014 Payroll Center Payroll Tab
The “Pay Employees” tab contains the information, functions and related links to perform the actual processing of payroll.
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Slide 2 QuickBooks 2014 Payroll Center Liabilities Tab
The “Pay Liabilities” tab provides one window that shows your tax and other payroll liabilities are currently due, or upcoming. A second window shows the payment history for your payroll liabilities, tabs in this window display those liabilities paid via E-Payments, or via all methods.
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Slide 3 - QuickBooks 2014 Payroll Center File Forms Tab
The “File Forms” tab is your point of access to produce and file your payroll tax and liability forms and reports. Again there are two windows and a bottom section which contains useful links.
If you use QuickBooks for Payroll you should really like the enhancements Intuit has made for 2014. The ‘payroll related functions’ have been redistributed to individual tabs within the Center rather than crowded together in a single pane. (See the title figure.)
The “Pay Employees” tab contains the information, functions and related links to perform the actual processing of payroll. (Click for Slide 1) Because this pane no longer has to display the functions for paying payroll liabilities, or preparing forms (such as payroll tax returns), there is room to provide more information. The bottom section of this tab contains links to other payroll functions such as Adding a New Employee, Setting-up Direct Deposit, Editing/Voiding a Paycheck, and creating a special ‘termination check’. The most common payroll reports are also found in this section.
The “Pay Liabilities” tab provides one window that shows your tax and other payroll liabilities are currently due, or upcoming. (Click for Slide 2) You can initiate payment by simply ‘checking’ the liability and clicking the View/Pay button. A second window shows the payment history for your payroll liabilities, tabs in this window display those liabilities paid via E-Payments, or via all methods. The bottom section provides links to allow you to Adjust Payroll Liabilities, Create Custom Payments, Deposit a Tax Refund, and produce the most common payroll liability reports.
The “File Forms” tab is your point of access to produce and file your payroll tax and liability forms and reports. (Click for Slide 3) Again there are two windows and a bottom section which contains useful links. The top window displays those tax forms that are due or soon to be due, the tax agency, and the filing period. Menu and task buttons allow you to access related features or begin the form production process. As you might expect the second window is your ‘form’ history again with tabs for E-filing or Saved (PDF form) copies. The bottom section provides resources, functional links and quick-order access (from Intuit of course) for 1099s and W-2 related products.
All in all I think these are a great enhancements to the Payroll Center, it now looks and feels more like other ‘centers’ within QuickBooks, and it provides you with a lot more information. One thing that didn’t get added this year, and which we have not had in the Payroll Center is feature specific ‘help’. In the versions of QuickBooks 2014 that I reviewed, it took forever for Help to open when I was in the Employee Center, and when it did all it provided was information on the ‘employee section’ of the Employee Center, not the Payroll Center. I hope Intuit has this fixed in the actual ‘production’ version of the initial public release, but then again Help didn’t really provide specifics for the payroll center in prior versions either.
I wrote this article based upon pre-release versions of QuickBooks 2014 products, so it is possible that some of the specifics I described within this article might be slightly different, or updated by the time QuickBooks 2014 is actually released. Over the next few weeks Intuitive Accountant will be reviewing more of the new features, functions and enhancements in the various versions of QuickBooks-2014.