Yearly income report shows total gross wages paid for the year, but "Salary & Wages" line item shows net amount from only few paychecks. Why is that?

It’s great to see you in the Community, @michaelyoung.

To clarify, could you tell the specific report you open? This can help me provide a timely solution to your concern. Any additional details is appreciated.

Also, you’d be glad to know that you can customize your reports in QBO to show the specific data you need. To be guided through the process, check out this link: Customize reports in QuickBooks Online.

Let me know if you need further assistance in running your reports. I’m always around ready to back you up. Keep safe and stay well.

Profit and loss report (also known as the income report).

I found that this account "Salary & Wages" is used in accrual accounting.

I may have had the company set to accrual for a few weeks, and then changed it to CASH accounting.

This may explain why the report only showed values for this account for a short time early in the year.

In any event, the net salary is showing in the Salaries & Wages account, while the gross wage amount is in the Wages account, and the report is adding both and reporting incorrectly the total as the wages expense.

The question now is how to remove these from the income and balance reports. 

Hi, michaelyoung. Let me help with your question about correcting payroll transactions.

We'll have to correct your current payroll preferences so your payment will flow to the correct payroll account. The Accounting preferences have options to choose specific accounts for each payroll item to apply to. To do this, consider following the steps below.

1. Select the Gear icon at the top, then Payroll Settings.
2. Click Accounting Preferences. Choose your desired account name from your Chart of Accounts from the drop-down.
3. Hit OK after choosing all your desired accounts.
4. You will receive a confirmation screen that your accounting preferences have been updated.

Please know that any changes to your settings may affect future transactions. For more additional information, we can check this article: Set up Payroll account preferences.

Once done, we'll need to delete and recreate the incorrect payroll transactions. If we don't have the option to delete it, I recommend contacting our Support team so they can assist you with the process to ensure that your created paychecks will be corrected.

Moving forward, once the transactions and affected accounts are corrected, the reports will do the same.

If you'll want to run a payroll-related report to have a quick review of the transactions that you've created so far. Use this article as a guide: Run payroll reports.

Let me know if we need further assistance with correcting your paychecks in QuickBooks. I'm always here to help. Have a good one.

Not sure how changing the account to flow to will fix my issue.  Right now it is set to flow to the Salaries and wages account.  I could change it to flow to the "Wages".account.  However, the Wages account already has the Gross wage in it, while the Salaries & Wages account has the NET amount.  For example, a payment of $1000. to the employee has that value in the Wages account, and the Salaries & Wages account has the net of $784.  The problem is both values appear in the profit and loss report under Payroll Expenses.

I have read some comments on customizing the report to omit the Salaries & Wages account from the report, but my basic subscription does not allow that in the available report customizations.