payroll liabilities and business expense split

Hi @coepllc,

Welcome to the Community. I'm here to lend a hand with your questions about recording payroll liability payments in QuickBooks Desktop.

The way your liabilities reflect depends on how you set them up in the system. Since there's an employee portion and business expense, you'll need two payroll items.

For now, I recommend checking your setup in QuickBooks. Please make sure to use the correct tax tracking type for the insurance.

There are multiple categories when setting up a payroll item for insurance. If you're unsure of which one to use, you can contact your insurance carrier.

This way, we can ensure these amounts will report accurately to your payroll forms and other sections in QuickBooks. For additional guidance about the types of insurance plans, check out this link: Set up a payroll item for an insurance.

For the employer business expense, you’ll need to create a Company Contribution payroll item to record the health insurance on your employee’s W-2s. We recommend using the Health Coverage Cost tracking type to report the expense portion.

By following the correct setup above, your liabilities will show individually in the Liabilities section. If E-pay is available for your agency and you pay through QuickBooks, the ability to have one transaction for both is unavailable.

You may need to make the payment separately. If you paid online, you have the ability to create a custom liability check to clear out the pending payables. It provides an option to create a single check and add payroll items to split the payments.

Check out this link for the detailed steps (scroll down to Create an unscheduled or custom liability check): Set up and pay scheduled or custom (unscheduled) liabilities.

For additional reference, you can use the following article to learn when to use a liability adjustment, as well as how to correct a liability check in QuickBooks: Adjust payroll liabilities in QuickBooks Desktop.

Fill me in if you have additional questions about paying payroll liabilities. I'm always here to help. Take care always.

Not sure I follow your post but I think I resolved it on my own.  I had not noticed before but when completing the liability check there's an "Expenses" tab just to the left of the "Payroll Liabilities" tab.  I can just split the business expense in Expenses and the employee liabilities portion in Payroll Liabilities.  They are both linked to the appropriate tax line mapping and the total shows up in the check/ACH field.

Hi there, @coepllc.

Thanks for getting back with us. Awesome job finding your own way to get this matter resolved. It's users like you that make having the Community available so beneficial. When we share what works us, might help another user who is facing the same type of issue. 

Please feel free to reach back here anytime. Have a fantastic day!