How do you record payroll taxes you paid to the Government

Hello @jashun559 ,

I'm assuming you are doing payroll manually in QBO.  If you are, you could follow these steps to record the payroll transactions.  This JE transaction will record all of your government payroll liabilities and give you a balance in any time period for which you must pay them.  It also allows you to produce a report for T4 information, should you be doing T4's manually.

When using JE's to create your payroll transactions, make sure you put your Employee's name in the 'Name' field on each line of the JE so that you can pull reports on each employee, if desired.  This report will enable you to manually fill in T4 information, which you can do here:  https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/leb0/webform/pub/disclaimer.action?request_locale=en

Make a JE for an employee's PR something like this:

(In this case, actual payroll cheque is written to Wages Payable, but you could post directly to your chequing account from here if you like; if you do, make sure you put the cheque # somewhere in the memo field, or even better, use the Cheque # in the Journal no.)

If you have taxable benefits like RRSP matching, etc. you would record a debit to the RRSP expense account for the employer's portion, and Credit the RRSP Payable account for the same amount.  Classify the RRSP expense employer's portion as T4, as that is the taxable benefit to the employee.  Then add another line to RRSP Payable account for the employee's portion, which is deducted from their gross wages.

You can create a report as follows, using a Custom Transaction Detail Report, filtering it for the columns you want to show, and employees you want to see, and filtering by Class T4, grouped by Employee. 

Any amount that you want to show up on this T4 report would have to be classified as 'T4' on the journal entry.

To determine your CRA payroll liabilities:  Create a custom report for your payroll liabilities to CRA.  Filter report for Transaction Type:  Journal Entry and Distribution Account:  Payroll Liabilities:CRA Payable.  Your report would look something like this:

When writing a cheque to the CRA, you can post each line to CRA Payable using memos as it is in the report if you want a breakdown of your payment showing in the cheque, or you can simply post the total amount to CRA payable and use this report as back up of what you owed and then paid.

Now having said all of this, if you are not doing payroll manually and rather are using QBO Standard or other Payroll, then you would use the built-in QBO tax reports to determine your payroll tax liabilities.  Go to Taxes-->Payroll Tax.  Any outstanding tax amounts will be there and available to file.

Hope this helps somewhat.