I have QBO with linked bank account and am adding Payroll . At the step Connect bank, Is it to set up bank connection to pay employee, or receive money for employee?

If the setup and the test transaction were verified, then your employee can expect their pay through direct deposit, henry-x-zhao-gma. 

Thanks for taking the time to reach out to the Community. You can easily set up payroll direct deposit in QuickBooks Online. After the initial and employees direct deposit setup, you need to verify a test transaction. A small debit of less than $1.00 will be taken from your account as a test. It only takes 2-3 business days to be verified. 

You’ll have to make sure you send or approve the transaction by at least 5 pm PST or two banking days before the pay date. If you don't, there may be additional charges or transaction may not be processed. You can check this direct deposit agreement to learn more about the service and your responsibilities. 

You might want to read these resources for more information about setting up direct deposit:

• How to set up payroll direct deposit
• Set up an employee for direct deposit

To process your first payroll in QuickBooks Online, let me break down the steps for you. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Payroll menu, then Employees.
2. Click Run payroll.
3. Choose a pay schedule, then Continue.
4. Select the employees you want to pay.
5. Make sure the payment method is set to Direct Deposit.
6. Enter their worked hours and other needed details.
7. Click Preview Payroll.
8. When you're ready, select Submit payroll.

In case you want to print your paycheck, you can refer to the link for detailed instructions.

Please let me know if you have any other banking concerns, I'll be always here to help you. Have a good one!

I logged in to my QBO account with Chrome Incognito and tried to setup Payroll with my bank accounts which I already linked from QBO. Shouldn't the bank accounts show up in the available bank list in addition to the Quickbooks Checking account? But they don't. I tried to connect them again from within Payroll but they are not available to connect. Do I need to un-link the bank account from QBO before I can link it  from Payroll??

Is this account used to pay to employee as employer(myself), or is it used to receive payment for employee (also myself)? 

Thanks.

Thanks for coming back, henry-x-zhao-gma.

I appreciate you for performing the steps provided by my colleague. If you are trying to set up direct deposit to pay your employees, we'll need to set up direct deposit for employees and company payroll for direct deposit. Then, it can take 1-3 business days to set up a checking account for direct deposit. Once it's set up, you'll use this account to pay your employees and your payroll taxes and you may have already connected your bank account. 

Then, Intuit makes a small deposit into your account of less than $1.00 when you give us your initial bank account information. We can input that amount to authorize the account for payroll transactions and it might be up to 2 days before you see that deposit. The charge will appear on the bank statement as either "QuickBooks: Verify Bank" or "Intuit: Verify Bank". You can check out this article for more details: Verify test transaction.

If the same thing happens, I'd suggest contacting our Customer Support Team. They'll pull up your account in a secure environment and help you with this one. You may send a message via chat, call us at a time convenient to you, or we’ll get in touch with you instead. To ensure we address your concern, our representatives are available from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM on weekdays and 6:00 AM - 3:00 PM on Saturdays, PST. See our support hours and types for more details about this one. Here's how: 

1. Click Help in the upper-right corner and select Contact Us.
2. Enter the details of your concern and click Let's talk.
3. Select how you want to reach them (phone or chat).
4. Enter the necessary details to complete your request.

Feel free to browse this link here if you need help with other tasks with managing your bank feeds and reconciling accounts. It'll route you to our general bank topics with articles.

The Community always has your back, and I'm just a post away should you ever need anything. Just leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. Have a great day ahead.