Payroll Bonus Check

Welcome to the Community, @missmissySEI. I aim to assist you in giving your employees bonus checks in QuickBooks Desktop without any issues. Allow me to provide some helpful information and guide you through the process.

The Unscheduled Payroll feature only appears in QuickBooks Desktop once there are scheduled payrolls set up on your account. It's likely that you don't have one yet that's why you can't see your desired option when navigating to the Pay Employees section. If this is the case, perform the following steps to add scheduled payroll:

1. Go to Employees, then choose  Payroll Center.                                                                                                           
2. Select the Payroll Schedule ▼ dropdown then New.                                                                                                   
3. Enter a name for the schedule and choose how often you'll pay employees on the schedule.
4. Complete the remaining fields, then hit OK.                                                                                                                    
5. Click on Yes or No if you would like to assign the new schedule to all your employees.

See this for more information about handling payroll schedules: Set up and manage payroll schedules in QuickBooks Desktop.

That should do it! You can now proceed to give your employees their bonus checks.

Here are extra articles you can also explore about keeping track and personalize payroll transactions:

• Run payroll reports in QuickBooks Desktop
• Customize and manage payroll reports in QuickBooks Desktop

Feel free to message me anytime if you have any questions or concerns about payroll. I'm more than willing to answer them for you. Take care and enjoy the rest of the week.

Do I have to set up a payroll schedule to do a bonus check? I pay my employees' weekly and no, I don't have a schedule set up for that, I just do it.  This bonus check is random, could be quarterly.  I just don't want it to interfere with the weekly payroll I just did.  If I have to set up a payroll schedule to do this I will, but it seems like a lot of work if I don't need a scheduled payroll for the way I normally do the regular payroll.

Hi there, missmissySEI.

I'm here to help ensure you can create a bonus check for your employees in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT).

To enable the Unscheduled Payroll option, it is necessary to first create a Payroll Schedule. This allows you to enter bonus checks for your employees without disrupting the regular weekly payroll you have already processed.

Setting up a Payroll Schedule offers an additional benefit of receiving an alert if the schedule is overdue. However, you have the option to ignore the alert if you prefer.

To create a schedule, you can follow the details steps shared by my colleague Mich_S above. Once done, you can now proceed with entering bonus checks for your employees. Here's how:

1. In QBDT, go to the Employees, then Pay Employees.
2. Select Unscheduled Payroll.
3. Verify the pay period end date, and the check date, then select the employee you want to pay.
4. Click Open Paycheck Detail.
5. Remove the Earnings and Other Payroll Items as needed.
6. In Earnings, enter the Bonus item.
7. In the Rate column, enter the gross amount of the bonus.
8. Adjust federal and/or state withholding taxes as needed.
9. Hit Save and Close or Save and Next to continue creating additional bonus paychecks.

To learn more about the process, check out this article: Pay an employee bonus.

I also recommend running the Payroll Summary report: This report provides a comprehensive overview of your payroll, including employee taxes and contributions, allowing you to track your payroll totals effectively. Refer to this article for future reference: Create a payroll summary report in QuickBooks.

Please let me know if you have additional questions about this or anything else. I'm always here to assist. Stay safe.

There's no need to first create a schedule in order to then use the Unscheduled Payroll button that will then appear.  What you're doing now is essentially the same as an unscheduled payroll.

In your case, if you want to create bonus checks, just start creating payroll as you always do and then change the pay items on the checks to use a bonus item - and remove or give any benefits or regular deductions that shouldn't appear a 0.00 amount on the checks.

So If I create a bonus check with today's date, then on next Monday when I do regular payroll, will it try to include the bonus check back in from today's date, when I enter the amount for the regular pay from today?

I do not have Payroll Center.  Under employee's I have Employee Center, Enter Time, Pay Employee's.

Now sure what you're asking?

When you create a new paycheck the prior check is never included in the new check.

I found it.  It is under Employee Center, Select the employee, edit, then payroll information.

Just wanted to make sure that I could create more than one check for the same employee on the same date.

Yes, you can do that. QuickBooks doesn't care.

@FritzF  So I don't have the option that was linked above.  I had to go into Employee Center, select employee, edit, then select payroll info.  Under that option I could set up a payroll schedule.  It asked all the questions that was stated above, but I still do not have the option to select unscheduled payroll.  I even logged out of QBs and logged back in and still, not option for unscheduled payroll.  

@BigRedConsulting  Thank you for your help.  I did try to set up the payroll schedule but it still does not give me the option to do an unscheduled payroll so I will just do it the way I normally do it, but select bonus instead of regular time.  Hopefully it will work.  I enter all my employees by first entering time (Weekly Time Sheet) so I am assuming I just skip that step and go to pay employees.  Again that you for your help.

I don't know why you care?

There's nothing special about an Unscheduled payroll, except that it won't advance your scheduled payroll. And, since you're not using scheduled payrolls - which are optional - then it makes no  difference.