Bookkeeping Cleanup Help payday setup while the months are open

Setup means the employer accounts exist, the deposit schedule is known, new-hire reporting has a path, and you can sign in without us. The provider calculates the pay, files the payroll forms it agreed to file, and keeps the register. We do not run a parallel payroll in a spreadsheet and we do not print checks from the accounting file.

A company that already runs payday stays, unless it cannot do the job you need. Switching mid-year splits the wage records. We stay unless the current company cannot do the job, and then the switch is dated and written down.

Each payday should land in the books as the provider reported it. Wages, taxes withheld, employer taxes, and the net that left the bank are different lines. A single withdrawal coded to payroll hides the pieces a quarterly form will later ask for.

Contractors are not payday. A contractor payment belongs on a bill or a check, with a payee you can list at year end. Mixing contractors into the payroll register, or mixing employees into contractor payments, is a classification problem. We will point at it. We will not decide a worker's status from a hunch.

Waiting to set payday up until the cleanup is done leaves every new Friday as another uncoded withdrawal. We would rather the new pay be clean while the old months are still a project. History is agreed to the registers you already have. It is not a reason to skip this Friday's setup.