Why doesn't my payroll by class using Time tracking in QBO show up by class on the report in Quickbooks Online after i run payroll?

Hello, Bre1208.

I'm dropping by to share some details about why the coded classes won't show up on the Profit and Loss by Class report. 

The classes coded on the timesheets are separate from the paychecks. After running payroll, the classes won't link with the paychecks as you've noticed. 

Paychecks have a different and separate Class tracking system. So, we'll want to enable this option from the Payroll settings page.

This way, when you run the Profit and Loss by Class report, your paychecks won't show up under the unclassified column. 

Here's how to do it: 

1. Click the Gear icon, then select Payroll settings.
2. Scroll down to the Accounting section, then click the Pencil icon.
3. Click the Pencil icon on the Class tracking section. 
4. Tick I use different classes for different employees.
5. Map the classes for each employee. 
6. Once done, hit Save. 

If you want to add the classes to the previous paychecks, we can do so by using the Update existing transactions function.

On the Accounting Preferences page, click the pencil icon on the Update existing transactions section. 

Set a Start Date, then hit Update. Check the data on the Profit and Loss By Class report to determine the dates for the unclassified paychecks. 

I'm sharing a couple of these articles if you need help with the Class tracking feature: 

• Set up and track your payroll expenses by class
• Create and manage classes in QuickBooks Online

I'll also include this article if you need to check and verify your current liabilities for the quarter: Run payroll reports.

Feel free to drop by again if you have questions about running your reports or managing the paychecks. You're also welcome to add any other concerns about your entries or tax forms. I'm here to help. 

Hi, 

Thank you for your response. I actually had seen this but was told by a quickbooks representative that it wouldn't work for us the way we need it to, due to the fact that we have different classes everyday for each employee (not every employee has the same class everyday) and setting it up in Quickbooks the way you described only allows one class per employee so we were told that we needed to use Timesheets instead so that we would be able to change the class to each different one per day when they log their time in etc, for each individual employee and we have done that but once it's approved in timesheets, it links over to payroll, but the only thing that does not come over is the Classes. Any idea how to fix that as i was told it's possible?

Thank you for getting back to us, @Bre1208.

I understand that you want to sync the timesheets with different classes per day to QuickBooks Online (QBO). I'd like to redirect you to the best support group available to get this address right away.

Syncing timesheets with different classes per day is possible. However, I recommend reaching out to our QuickBooks Time Support Team since they will turn on some settings on their end for you to be able to sync the classes.

To reach them, call the phone number or use the chat links from this article: Contact QuickBooks Time support.

Just in case you want to manage time off in QuickBooks Time, you can check out this article for more guidance: Set up and Manage Time Off in QuickBooks Time.

Come back to this post if you have other concerns or follow-up questions about this. I'll be around to provide further assistance.

Thank you Mark for replying and trying to help. Unfortunately, i called the number you provided for the Quickbooks Time support, explained the problem and what you said needed to happen. They had no idea what i was talking about and said there was nothing on their end they could change in the settings.. so i spent two hours on the phone after being transferred multiple times to multiple people and they checked every setting i had, even did a screen share and they confirmed i have everything set correctly and have no idea why it's not working and showing up under "Class" on my reports instead of Unspecified. Basically spent three hours speaking to four different people and no one could fix the problem. Starting to think we need to cancel QBO all together and go back to the old software unfortunately as no one seems to be able to fix this and it's the only reason we moved to QBO because we were told Payroll could be classified by Class. 

Thanks anyway.

But I have employees that will work in different classes during the course of the day as well as the week. How does this get performed? It would seem that if you can track everything else individually why not time?

 What am I am missing? If it doesn't then this seems to be a major flaw.

I understand the situation you're in, Ryoungster99.

I know it will make it easier for you to track your employees if the assigned class for their timesheet appears on the report. Currently, the designated class on the timesheet is allocated for the customer or vendor transaction. This is why it appears as unclassified on the Profit & Loss report when used on the payroll.

The classifications on the timesheets are different from the paychecks. If you wish to use different classifications for specific employees, you can follow the procedures described by my colleague jamespaul above.

Alternatively, you can export your report to Excel and manually assign classes there to keep control of your employees' time. I've included a link to help you: Export your reports to Excel from QuickBooks Online.

This is also an excellent addition to future product development. I recommend that you give feedback through your QBO account. All requests will be reviewed by our Product Development Team. Once approved, they can incorporate it in the next release.

Here's how:

1. Go to the Gear icon, then select Feedback.
2. Enter your request.
3. Hit Next to submit.

You might want to look at this guide on using classes in QBO. It covers related articles on budgeting and running reports: Get started with class tracking in QuickBooks Online.

Feel free to post again if you need further help in QuickBooks. Have a great day.

Jamespaul answer doesn't address my issue.

If I hear you correctly, You can't track an employee class if you have a single employee who would work in multiple classes per day or week?

That would seem like it is a major flaw.

It behaves this way in QB Desktop? Why not QBO?

I am not trying to track paychecks, I am looking to make my financials to work, by allocating their payroll into the many different department to which they work without having to do a bunch of calculations an journal entries

I understand your want of the feature to track an employee that works in multiple classes per day or week in QuickBooks Online (QBO), @Ryoungster99.

QBO and QuickBooks Desktop are two separate platforms. As a result, they have different limitations. Because of this, the aforementioned is available in QBDT but not QBO.

I recommend sending us feedback about this. Your insights will then be forwarded to our product engineers. This helps them enhance your QBO experience. Here's how:

1. Click on the Gear icon.
2. Select Feedback.
3. Type in your comments or product suggestions. 
4. Then hit Next to submit feedback.

You can also browse the QuickBooks Online Feature Requests webpage to review any feature request updates.

For future use, read this guide on how to personalize payroll reports in QBO: Customize and manage payroll reports in QuickBooks Online Payroll.

Keep in touch so we can help you further with payroll or QuickBooks. Take the best care!

this is absolutely mind boggeling and maddening.  I have spent none less than 20+ hours and jumping through hoops and waiting on hold and being ensured that it should be able to integrate, and to manaully change the classes, as you have been doing. for literally YEARS.  this is the first i am hearing that its simply NOT an option on QBO, and only on desktop.  I've never used desktop.  But i assume thats only on one computer?  my book keeper and assistant and CPA and i all log in to view/work on our books. like you said, this is a MAJORRRRRRRR fail on QBO's part.  There literally must be thousands of business owners wasting thousands and thousands of hours and screwing up their books with inaccurate accounting reports and are incapable of getting true profitability to their jobs.  Which is literally the primary function of an accounting software.  I could literally lose my mind over this.  

I guess ill follow those stupid directions to "give a suggestion to a development/function change", but how in the hell has this multibillion dollar company missed such a large mark on this?  I guess because they mostly have drones in other countries who can not think for themselves to develop and solve problems.  Maybe after 1,000 business owners waste thounsads upon thousands of hours trouble shooting, and finally realizing its incapable and need to report - maybe in a few years theyll add this function.  I appreciate you bringing this to light! I hope others see this thread and you, and the OP, and everyone else follows the step to recommend the change. thanks!

This has been single handedly one of the worst experiences of owning a business to try to get this fixed, only to finally find your post, and see that its not a capability for qbo and only for desktop.  i will be submitting the "feedback" in the top right hand gear DAILY, and I hope both of you on this post will be too, until this issue is fixed.  One of the most frustrating things ive ever experienced in my life. thanks for posting! at least it saves me more hours of my life trying to get someone to understand and fix it and lie to me that it should work, or shouldnt or they have zero clue what theyre talking about!  im sure one of these days itll be added as a feature.  till then, we keep wasting time and money to do it manually.

I need someone to escalate this to fix the problem

Someone needs to escalate this to the top tier ASAP to figure this glitch out and develop a solution.  I have already reported it as feedback, and will continue to do so daily until its created and fixed.  

I have manually provided feedback and will continue to flood the system daily with the same recommendation until it is develped and fixed. someone needs to escalate this to the top tier to fix and create this immediately.  quickbooks is creating a miserable system and time/money suck for thousands of helpless business owners

I have reported this and will report it every single day till its fixed. please report it internally and find someone who can fix this immediately

i wholeheartedly agree with you and I'm very angry about it as well as my client too! I spent weeks and probably about 40+ hours just trying to get an answer from QBO Help.. it was escalate and even they couldnt fix it. It's very sad that they charge us as much as they do and have a software that can't even handle the basic accounting we need. My client is outraged as the only way we found around this is twice the work, you have to create Sub Customers "what we previously used as classes" and then you have to use Projects.. and create a whole project and enter the timesheets using that, then run payroll, and then after all of that extra data entry.. you will be able to run a report by customer and see the payroll by sub customer/job etc.  it's a huge pain and they have decided to go back to their old system as QBO is not worth it at this point. MAJOR FAIL!!! i have reported it also but they never pay attention to those in my experience.. it's really a joke! 

thank you for your feedback and response though as i felt like i was going crazy at one time and was the only one having this issue. 

oh. my goodness - that sounds crazy.

what i have been doing was using connect team to track time. then manually adding them up.  and then converting from minutes to decimals. then changing the classes per employee, and putting in their hours for that class.  and then move on to the next class, and tally and manually add those hours . If we're all at one job, its relatively quick and easy. but if i have 5 people working at 4 different job sites in a week, it takes me a good hour and its quite chaotic and prone to error.  we refused to believe that I was the only person who need this requirement to run a small business.  Whats the point of even having classes, of the P&L is completely inaccurate and useless if it doesnt properly allocate payroll?  Ill keep reporting it. i swear it'll change one day. but who knows, iti could be years!  i think we'll have to go back to manual.  What is the other system that you found to work? thanks!

I completely understand. All bc of QBO, it's causing ten times more work when it's supposed to be helping us. Well, the other system they used, I don't even know the name of it yet, but it doesn't track invoicing or expenses near as good as QBO, which is also why they wanted to switch to QBO because we were told you could track payroll by jobs etc.. however i do have a completely different client.. who is also a construction company (home builder).. they actually use a software called Contractors Foreman, and it's basically used for each employee to be able to log in daily and track the job they are at and their time etc... now here is the crazy fact!!!!.. that system works with QBO perfect!.. AND... it merges it's timesheets daily from contractors foreman to QBO automatically and once i process those timesheets, and then do payroll the P&L by class comes out perfect for payroll.. Interesting that if you manually enter time on a timesheet and by class etc, it will not work. but if you use contractors foreman to sync into QBO, it works perfect!!! which tells me.. this is a HUGE GLITCH for QBO that they have no idea what they are doing... crazy info right?

Interesting - i just looked in to the contractor foreman. looks like a good program! and specifically says "integrates with quick books desktop" and "integrates with qbo".  obviously QBO missing the memo (). Thanks for the heads up and insight!  We are not crazy after all - just the hundreds of qbo employees that dont know their own system. 

We have wasted literal weeks trying to figure out QBO for job costing, only to find out, it didn't do what we were promised. We have now gone BACK to QB Desktop and are trying to utilize QB Time to track Equipment hours and have not had any luck. We are told to make "classes", well those "classes" aren't syncing back from the timecards to desktop, even though they were originally made in desktop. So frustrating.

Were you able to figure out a way to track equipment through QB Time?

Hi Prime 12, 

Yes I did but it’s not done the way it should be and it’s not near as easy as QuickBooks online tells you it is. It is not tracked by class but instead by customer/project, because we use a separate software called contractor foreman for our employees to log all of their time on those timesheets, and then it merges with QuickBooks online, and basically enters the timesheet information from that software into QuickBooks online timesheets for us by job site/job costs etc. It is actually the only reason that it works with QuickBooks online because what I have noticed is if I manually change anything in the time sheets in QuickBooks or if I manually enter a timesheet, then it does not show up on the reports correctly. So basically, without the other software, merging and syncing into QuickBooks online, it just does not work. Basically, Quickbooks says it does but even they can’t tell you how to make it work. I literally spent three months every week spent hours working on this and no one could help me from Quickbooks.
basically this is how it works for us: from contractor foreman when it merges into QuickBooks, it syncs the “projects” in contractor foreman as sub customers in QuickBooks online. Then on the timesheets when it syncs with QuickBooks online, it codes it to that project/sub customer on the Qbo timesheets. So after you run payroll using those timesheets, then you can run a report in QuickBooks online and customize it by customer and it will show your job cost correctly under the columns for that project/sub customer.. this is the only work around I’ve been able to find as Qbo employees have yet to fix this issue in their software. It’s very sad because it is something that they offer, however, they have admitted to me that they have not tested it out and not real sure how it works or if it even works at all, so they really should not be offering this as a service that comes with the really expensive software that we already pay for.. huge disappointment! 
hope this info helps you somehow. 

@Bre1208 @Prime12 @Flipping sykesville 

I agree with all you. 

Can't have multiple classes for each employee. 

My payroll data hasn't come over correctly for job costing some of the time. Have had an open investigation for weeks.

Job costing is a joke. Such false advertising.

My list of issues is so long now.

We are shopping around for other solutions. 

I come to the community page at least once a week to figure something out only to find it has been broken for four years or they didn't implement it from desktop, etc...LOTS of unhappy customers. I guess with 7million users, they don't care.

This statement is untrue - here is why I think this:

My company migrated from QBDT to
QBO Advanced with QBO Payroll Elite (July 2023).
The functionality of timesheets to payroll was causing the same issues described here, ruining the reliability of our project costing and profitability reports. 

-allocating 1/5 of our staffs’ hours to projects, despite all employees designating every hour on their timesheets to a project

-incorrect mapping to chart of accounts, an issue that was never acknowledged or discussed during our onboarding with Payroll “Elite”

-vacation and holiday hours, which are unable to be designated to projects, were in fact showing up as costs on projects

———--QBO Support advised that this was a known issue; they had a new investigation open for it, and had a reopened case number for it. They had no resolution, i never heard back about the status, nor have i been able to find any pages to look up investigation numbers online

————-hired a professional QBO consultant that admittedly could not keep up with updated features

Convinced that this was a setup issue and unable to resolve the discrepancies at a project level (without using the dreaded journal entries), we’ve built an entire new QBO profile from scratch to start fresh in 2024. 

In the QBO - Advanced “Account and Settings”, we selected the ability to track Classes to differentiate between our 2 offices.

In “Payroll Settings”, we selected each employee to map to the Class associated with their office. 

Once everything was set up in QBO, we switched our focus to setting up QB Time. In QB Time under “Preferences”, we unchecked the box for “Class” so that our staff would not need to enter separate classes for each time entry (because we had already assigned each individual employee to the correct class in the step above)

All timesheets were entered and approved in QB Time, then we ran our first payroll in the new QBO (12/24 - 1/6, pay date 1-11).

Immediately identified that hours were correctly designated to projects in QB Time and QBO project costs, BUT when payroll processed, only 1 (out of 25) employee’s checks posted to projects.

Upon troubleshooting, we identified that by ***unchecking the “Class” box in QB Time Preferences for QBO Payroll integration***, the selection to “Track Classes” in QBO Advanced settings was consequently turned off. 

Baffled, we toggled this back and forth 3 times to ensure what we’re seeing was correct - and it was.

Therefore, this response is incorrect - the Class feature IS directly linked in the integration tool between QB Time and QBO Payroll. Furthermore, we are unable to simplify our employee timesheet experience. 

Please help!

I understand the challenges you're experiencing with the employee class tracking, AmandaR. 

I want to ensure you're directed to our available support to handle this issue.

I suggest contacting our QuickBooks Support experts. They have the tools to access your account and review the status of your case. 

1. Navigate to the Help menu at the upper right.
2. Go to the Search tab.
3. Press Contact Us at the bottom part. 
4. Enter your concern in the What can we help you with? box.
5. Click Continue.
6. Select Chat with us or Have us call you.

In addition, I'm sharing an article that offers businesses the benefits of accuracy, compliance, financial analysis, and record-keeping about your business and employees: Run payroll reports.

Please don't hesitate to return if you have any questions about generating reports or handling payroll. I'm here to assist you.