Manage Expenses With QuickBooks Employee and Payroll Reports

QuickBooks offers a collection of payroll reports that generate a wealth of information about a company’s employees and expenses. These reports can provide information about general staff or about individual employees, and can be easily exported to share and diversify uses for the data.

Employee Data Reports

The following reports can help manage company headcount and give an overview of total labor hours, wages paid, and other useful statistics such as:

• Payroll Summary: This report can be generated for individual employees or for all employees from a specific range of dates. It can include gross pay, net pay, taxes, and any other deductions.
• Payroll Detail: This report can drill down to information on individual paychecks, including compensation history and deductions.
• Payroll Deductions and Contribution: This report provides details about individual and collective employee deductions, as well as company contributions for single pay periods over a range of dates.
• Employee Detail: This report lists employees by name along with addresses, birth dates, hire dates, termination dates, pay rates, and tax information. Pay rate information can include salaries or hourly rates along with deductions or contributions. Tax information can include social security numbers along with federal, state, and local taxes paid.
• Employee Directory: This report can gather contact information for each employee, including work location, phone numbers, and email address.
• Total Pay: This report provides information on each employee’s total pay by type, whether it be salary, hourly, or otherwise.

Employer Administrative Use Reports

The following reports can help complete a company's payroll tax filings. Others can help cross-check financial data, such as retirement plan reports, vacation, and sick leave.

• Payroll Tax Liability: This report shows all payroll taxes withheld, paid, and owed for employees. This can be broken down by what has already been paid, what needs to be paid, or everything combined. This report can provide all data for the company or data only for payroll taxes owed for individual employees.
• Payroll Tax Payment: This report show all the payroll tax payments for the time period entered. 
• Payroll Tax and Wage Summary: This report show taxable wages that are subject to federal, state, and local withholding, including the amount of taxes paid per employee or for the company as a whole. 
• Workers Compensation: This report show wages paid for each eligible employee. This is valuable information to help prepare forms for state agencies or insurance companies.
• Vacation and Sick Leave: This report shows hours available and used year-to-date per employee. Searching for available hours that have not been used is a good way to identify whether or not there is upcoming time off that will be used. 
• Total Payroll Cost: This report shows all year-to-date costs associated with payroll for employees and contractors. This includes gross pay, net pay, deductions, company contributions, and taxes.
• Retirement Plan: This report shows all contributions—from employees and the company—to all available retirement plans, including: 401(k), 401(k) Catch-up, SIMPLE 401(k), SIMPLE 401(k) Catch-up, 403(b), 403(b) Catch-up, SARSEP, SARSEP Catch-up, SIMPLE IRA, SIMPLE IRA Catch-up, After-tax Roth 401(k), and After-tax Roth 403(b).
• Payroll Billing Summary: This reports show all charges in the QuickBooks Online Payroll Full Service Account, if this feature has been activated.

Putting the Data to Work

One of QuickBooks' reporting benefits is that you can export data relatively easily into other spreadsheets. This allows for customizable data that can be shared with stakeholders.

Reports are especially helpful for human resources and payroll employees. With a few clicks, the software program can generate detailed information about individual employees or groups of employees, broken down by type of pay (hourly or salary), department, or location. This information is vital when cutting paychecks and both verifying and tracking payroll expenses.

Data can also be customized to show only the information staff needs to see. For example, managers may need to track things like overtime hours, vacation, sick days, and contact information—but shouldn't have access to more sensitive data (such as social security numbers.) When permitted, employees can also access information relevant to their positions.

Further customization of reports can exclude certain data through the software itself, or filter information manually when exporting the data to a public or private spreadsheet.