Pay employee with a physical check with a linked checking account

Let me share some insights about paying employees via physical check for their payroll transactions, autotekk.

You can use your Wells Fargo account when issuing a paper check to your employee. 

With QuickBooks Online (QBO) Payroll, you can temporarily switch your employee's payment method to a paper check once you issue a physical check to your employee. This way, the system will calculate the taxes correctly when you run their paychecks through our system.

With QuickBooks Checking, the system doesn't automatically use the money in your payroll envelope. After running payroll outside of QuickBooks, you need to manually transfer the money from the payroll envelope to the bank account you use for payroll. This manual transfer is necessary to ensure that you have enough funds in the account to cover your payroll.

You can check out these articles as your guide:

• Create envelopes to set your funds aside with QuickBooks Checking
• Use your QuickBooks Checking account

You can rely on me if you have follow-up questions while working with your payroll entries in QuickBooks. Just leave a comment below so I can assist you further. Have a good one!  

I think the problem is that I set this up with the instructions from the payroll department with QuickBooks online

and now I have a paycheck in both my QuickBooks checking account register that has not cleared, because it won't clear since I've also got the actual check that I wrote in Wells Fargo that has cleared

so maybe a journal entry to get the QuickBooks register to balance correctly

Thanks for following up with the Community, autotekk189.

You can use a journal entry to get a register to balance correctly, however I'd recommend working with an accounting professional to confirm if it's the appropriate adjusting entry you should be making.

If you're in need of one, there's an awesome tool on our website called Find a ProAdvisor. All ProAdvisors listed there are QuickBooks-certified and able to provide helpful insights for driving your business's success.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to our Find a ProAdvisor page.
2. Use the City or ZIP search field to specify a location.
3. Select Find a ProAdvisor.
4. Browse through your results and find one that works best for the business. You can click on each ProAdvisor's profile to learn more information about them.
   
   

Once you've found an accountant, they can be contacted through their Send a message form:
 

1. Use the available text box to introduce yourself. Be sure to include details about which services you're looking for.
2. Enter your appropriate info in the Your name, Your email, and Your phone number (optional) fields.
3. Select Send message.

I've also included a detailed resource about working with journal entries which may come in handy moving forward: Create journal entries

If there's any additional questions, I'm just a post away. Have a wonderful Tuesday!

I appreciate your help but, I'm not very happy with QuickBooks right now. I paid for the assistant service and then got ahold of the payroll department to make sure I set this up correctly. And of course you guys with QuickBooks help me set it up incorrectly. It would be nice to just change the paycheck instead of it saying ran through QuickBooks checking then it could be switched to a paper check through Wells Fargo. But no of course not you guys always fall back on that go ahead and hire an accountant to do it!

Not a happy customer

Whatever you do, don't sign up for the QB checking. We moved money into a QB envelope for payroll and ended up paying a paper check through a different business bank account not tied to this, and the envelope took the money when payroll was processed and now no one can seem to find this 5k+ that is missing. It's been a months long process with no answers.

Maybe instead of trying to sell me a product you could have just given me an answer to the problem. After some more extensive research there was a very simple solution. It looks like all I had to do was recategorize the transaction in my Wells Fargo account, the account that I actually wrote the check out of like this