Tracking different work locations for employees

Hi there Tretan and welcome to the Community!

I love that you've set up multiple work locations for your employees in order to better distinguish between where each job took place. That's a fantastic way to stay organized but I can see how it isn't working as you expect. Let me go over another QuickBooks Online feature that might suit your needs a little better.

Rather than setting a work location within your employee profiles, I'm confident that getting started with Class Tracking will be the right feature for you. You can use classes to track your transactions by meaningful segments within your business in order to get insights and run reports.This feature can be used with Payroll as well. You simply have to turn the feature on then assign classes to your employees.

To get started, you can check out our comprehensive article below. It goes over every step of the process and provides links to additional articles that'll be of use to you:

• Get started with class tracking in QuickBooks Online

When you're ready, you'll want to turn on class tracking in both your Account and Settings and Payroll Settings. Here's how to turn on class tracking:

1. Navigate to the Gear icon, then choose Account and Settings.
2. Choose the Advanced tab, then choose the Categories section to edit it.
3. Turn on Track classes and select Warn me when a transaction isn't assigned a class if you want to.
4. Decide how you want to assign classes under Assign classes.
5. Hit Save, then Done to save this change.

Once that's set up, you can get class tracking turned on within your Payroll Settings:

1. Navigate to the Gear icon once again and choose Payroll Settings.
2. Under Preferences choose Accounting, then Accounting Preferences.
3. Locate the classes section or hit Customize to find it. Choose if you want to use the same class for all employees, or different classes for each. 
4. Assign employee classes.
5. Save your preferences by hitting OK then OK again.

Now you'll be able to set up your class list, track your transactions and run reports by class, and even create a budget by class. All this and more can be found in the article shared above.By setting up class tracking this way, you'll be able to run reports more accurately and won't run into the issue you're experiencing whereby all of your payroll is showing as run under the same location. 

If you'd like to submit feedback on the Work Location feature, in order to express how it might be changed to suit your needs better, please do so by navigating to the Gear icon, then hitting Feedback. These messages go directly to our product development team who take them into consideration when implementing improvements and new features. I'll pass this along on my end as well, because I know how important it is to have features functioning as expected.

Let me know if you need any more guidance when it comes to using Class Tracking. There are loads of resources and I'm happy to help. Take care!

Hi Rebecca,

Thank you for your extensive and detailed response.

We are considering adding classes now.

So I understand that I will assign the employees to the class according to location in our case.

Questions:

1 - Once that employee changes location, do I change the class under Payroll settings again?

2 - If I run an annual report by classes, will the right payroll show in the right class for that particular employee?

Hi there Tretan,

Thanks for getting back to me and I'm glad to hear that you're considering using Classes to keep your employees and their locations organized when running payroll. I've done some further testing, and it appears that an employee can only be assigned one class. In this situation, changing the class would result in all payruns for that employee being assigned to the new class that's saved. This is the same result you experienced when changing the Work Location in your employee's profile, so I don't think this is the solution. I do have one other idea that just might work for your situation. 

While you can't assign multiple classes to one employee, you can track time using different classes or locations. For example, if you've turned on Class Tracking and Location Tracking in the Advanced section of your Account and Settings, you or your employees will be able to enter a Single time activity or Weekly timesheet with a location or class specified. From there you can run a Time Activities by Employee Detail report and customize it to see exactly what you're looking for. Since you're using QBO Payroll, the time activity that you enter will automatically populate into your weekly pay runs. Let me explain this in further detail.

Once you've set up either Class Tracking or Location Tracking in QuickBooks Online Plus, you can begin adding Classes and Locations by navigating to the Gear icon, then choosing All Lists. You'll find both Classes and Locations from that page, and can select either option to add to your list. For clarity's sake, let's say that you'll choose to track Location. When you navigate to the list of locations, you can hit New to enter as many as you'll need to track. 

In order to track your employee's hours by location, you'll want to hit the + New button and select either Single time activity or Weekly timesheet. You'll notice a dropdown for location, so you can select the appropriate location that your employee worked at for a specific time entry. Once saved, you'll be able to view this in report format. 

Navigate to the Reports menu, then use the search field to locate the Time Activities by Employee Detail report. In order to see time entries for each employee sorted by vacation, you'll want to use the following steps to Customize the report:

1. Hit Customize.
2. Under Rows/Columns choose to Group by Location (if you opt with using Classes, you'd select Class here).
3. Choose to Filter the report and select the checkmark for Employee.
4. Use the dropdown besides Employee to decide if you'd like to see time activity for all employees or just specific employees.
5. Select Run report.

You'll now be viewing the time activities you or your employees have entered, by location. When you run payroll, these time activities will migrate over and reflect under the hours your employees are paid for each pay run. 

Let me know if this option hits the mark. I also want to encourage you to submit Feedback by navigating to the Gear icon. I think it's important that our product development team hears from users like you regarding how the Work Location or Payroll Class preferences could be better suited to your business' needs. I'll be sure to pass this along on my end as well.

I wish you the best, and am here if you should have any further questions.

Hi Rebecca,

Will this procedure "keep" the location of the employee? Or... if employee changes location, and next timesheets have another location assign, previous timesheets will change to the new location saved?

Entering timesheets in QBO was not a good fit for us before and I don't want to start an extra process if it's not gonna work.

On another note, I brought this up a few years ago with your team through feedback a few times with no response.

Hi Tretan. Glad to hear back from you again. I'll be happy to assist you from here going forward. Once you change the employee's location, changes will affect any new timesheets and not the previous ones. I appreciate you taking the time to bring this up to our engineers. Let me know if you have other questions, I'm here to help. 

thank you James.

Where are the timesheets again? I would give it a try

I found it.

Problem is I don't need the totals hours but total amounts.

Why would QBO have the option for work locations if you can't have more than one location per employee?

This only provides totally wrong reports.

We dealt with an audit a couple years ago and I was not able to provide the right reports.

Please have this fixed.

I hear you on this. Your feedback on this is valuable. I can see the benefit of having more than one location for an employee and I'd be glad to forward this as feedback to our product developers. You can also do the same by clicking the Gear icon and looking for Feedback. Feel free to check out some of the helpful resources I've linked below:

Product Tutorials

How to set up multiple work locations and assign employees to them

I'll be one message away if you need anything else. 

I would like to see that you escalate the need of this fix. As I mentioned before, I've already reported this under Feedback many times, and nothing was done about it in the last 3 years.

I see what you're saying. If you'd like to escalate this further, I recommend contacting our support team so they can pull up your account and assist you accordingly. This ensures that any contact/personal information is kept private as you'll be assisted in a private environment. Here's our contact details: 

• Schedule a Callback or start a Chat: click (?)Help in the upper right > type and enter "Contact support" into the QB Assistant > click Contact Us > explain your situation > click Let's Talk > choose Get a callback or Start a Chat. 
• Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I appreciate you trying to help, but be aware that I called yesterday, before started contacting QBO this way, and they hang up on me once she realized she could not help me any further.

This is vicious circle that doesn't take me anywhere.

I've been patient... it's been years now, and I think it's about time that QBO does something about it.

Maybe you can have someone contact me at (#######).

I appreciate your patience with this. What you've described isn't an experience I'd like for you to have. We prioritize providing exceptional customer service and I'd like for you to experience that. I can tell you're just as eager as I am to see this feature on your account. I highly suggest reaching out to our team in a private/secure environment where your contact info and personal info is secure. This ensures you get the right support which is specific to your needs. I'd be happy to help you in this environment but due to prioritizing your account privacy, it's best you contact our support team directly. Feel free to ask other questions. 

I set up my employees by class, but when I run the Statement of Activities by Class it doesn't put them in the Class in the wages expense, and when I run a statement of Activity Detail the column under class is empty for Wages. Account preferences under payroll shows that they are assigned a class. Is there another step? or is it that it will only work going forward?

Hello LW18. Glad to have to connect with us on this thread. I'll be happy to assist you with running class reports so you can achieve your QuickBooks goals. Based on what you've described, I recommend checking to make sure your report dates are in sync with the data you're looking for on the report. Another thing to check for is the accounting method as each method reports your income and expenses differently. This article here has more info about the accounting methods available in QuickBooks and how to use them to your advantage. Let me know if this info helps. I'll be here in case you have other questions. 

I was looking for this feature as well.  From what I see QBO does not handle this.  What we are talking about is "effective dating" of the assignment of classes and/or locations.  So it would be nice to see for example an employee assigned to a class/location effective from 1/1/21 to 3/31/21 and then assigned to a different class/location effective from 4/1/21 to present.  Then any reports that are run would display the employee time and cost under the correct class/location for the respective dates.  This would provide accurate employee time/cost reporting and accurate class/location reporting.

Hi ccorder.

Tracking information so you can pull it up at a glance is one of the great features of QuickBooks Online. I'd be happy to point you in the right direction.

Being able to track classes based on the date they were entered in a single report is not currently one of the features of QuickBooks Online. If this is a feature you wish to have I recommend sending feedback to our development team. You can do so by following these steps:
 

1. Select the Gear icon at the top, then Feedback.
2. Enter your comments or product suggestions. Then select Next to submit feedback.

Once our development team receives your feedback they'll look into ways to possible add this in future updates.

If you have any questions let us know and we'd be happy to help!

This is not a long term solution - but I wanted to offer what I found related to assigning "Location" (which I have set to "Business") for payroll related entries.  Again, not a long term solution and would be time consuming for a lot of employees.  I was able to run payroll (which does assign "Class", then go into the register for the account(s) that are impacted by the payroll entries and add the Business/Location to the entry in the register.  If you do it for one account it seems to update the register entry for all accounts for that entry.  I assume this is because Location is a header level assignment (whereas Class is a line item level assignment).

After doing this I was able to run Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss statements by Business/Location and get the results I wanted.

Note: This approach also solves the issue of an employee changing location over time because the Location assignment is by register entry and not coming from the payroll.

I still look forward to a way to make this header level Location assignment during the payroll run.

Hi there ccorder,

Thanks for sharing your solution with the Community in order to assist others. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out here.