Employees and payroll

Hi there, Rose H.

Thanks for joining the Community. I'm here to address your concern with recording a child support in QuickBooks.

If you want to show child support deductions on owner's W-2 Form, record them on the paycheck in QuickBooks Desktop. If you don't have a payroll subscription, you can set up payroll in a few easy steps.

Let me show you how:

1. Make sure that your preferences are set up for payroll. 
   
   • From the Edit menu, select Preferences.
   • On the left pane, choose Payroll & Employees, and then go to the Company Preferences tab.
   • Click on OK.
    
2. From the Help menu, choose QuickBooks Help (or press F1 on your keyboard).
3. In the Help Search field, type in manual payroll, and then press Enter.
4. Select the Process payroll manually (without a subscription to QuickBooks Desktop Payroll) topic. Then, click on the manual payroll calculations link.
5. Select the Set my company file to use manual calculations link. (Note: When your company file is set up for a manual payroll computation, QuickBooks inserts a zero amount for each payroll item associated with a tax.)
6. Click on OK to confirm.
7. Close and reopen QuickBooks.

As a reference, you can also check out this article for further guidance: Set up payroll without a subscription.

Note: For the owner's payroll, that would be an expense and at the same time, a liability for the business.

Then, follow the steps in this article to set up a payroll garnishment: Child Support.

Once done, you are now ready to create paychecks. Just go to Employees, choose Payroll Center, and select Start Unscheduled Payroll.

You can check out this article for the detailed steps: Create paychecks.

This should point you in the right direction. Please let me know if you have further questions. I'm always here to answer them. Have a wonderful day.