I honestly haven't looked at my W-2 preview yet. I assume there could be more changes before the end of the year, so I'm just trying to take one step at a time which is plenty work as it is!

If the line items for the FFCRA pay are set up correctly, it automatically populates.  If they aren't set up correctly, it won't fill in anything for credits and it will not display the Worksheet 1.

I had to add the special employer line items for payroll when I did 1 payroll with emergency paid leave FFRC.  The worksheet 1 automatically printed out when I created the 941 form.  I unfortunately am having an issue with the total deposits paid not equally what I actually paid (but that is another issue)

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@J Myers wrote:

I have same type of inquiry--use payroll enhanced version with quickbooks desktop. Manually have all numbers computed for worksheet 1 but no idea how to get entered in 941.  How do I get my worksheet 1 numbers into the 941 form i am needing to efile?

 

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We can run your Payroll Liability Accruals & Payment reports, nexusgirl1.

It's possible that there are payments that weren't included within the specified period. Let me show you how to run the report:

1. Go to the Employees menu and click Payroll Center.
2. Click the Pay Liabilities tab. 
3. At the bottom under Reports, click Payroll Liability Accruals & Payments. 
4. Select the correct period of report you'll want to see the payments. Then, Create Report.
5. Look into the Payroll and Payments tab of the Excel file and see if there are payments that should or should not be included. 

You can look into the Payment within your QuickBooks Desktop company file and edit the date from there. Here are a few articles that will walk you through in managing your taxes. 

• E-Pay tax liability payments
• How QuickBooks Populates The 941

I'm just here if you have other questions. Take care and have a great day!

As you realize, the wages that are eligible for the credit cannot be used toward fulfilling the forgivable portion of the PPP.  However, even if you do NOT take the credit, you still cannot use those wages to fulfill the PPP forgivable requirements.  The fact that the are ELIGIBLE for the credit makes them INELIGIBLE for applying toward the PPP requirement.  Please check with your accountant.  I have read the fine print over many times.  Best wishes!

I am having the same issue.  I had eligible wages that were paid in April, and QB didn't come up with the update and instructions to properly set up the tracking of the wages until May.  Consequently, my April wages are not reflected in the 941.  I would like to override the amounts, as others have mentioned, but QB hasn't yet gotten the hint. 

If I were to do a manual 941, I don't know how it would affect other reports within QB, as others have mentioned.  If I were to void the April checks and reissue them, I am concerned that the tax tables are now different and would create a mess that couldn't be reversed.  (I could attempt a "fake" new check and see if the amounts are the same, I guess).  

I am expecting a better response from QB than what has been given.

Thank you for your consideration

I got you covered, mwhip.

You can delete and recreate the April checks. QuickBooks Desktop will calculate the taxes based on the tax table available on the transaction date selected.

Before doing so, I recommend creating a backup company file. You will be able to reverse it anytime by restoring the backup.

Here's how:

1. In QuickBooks, go to the File menu and select Switch to Single-user Mode.
2. Go to the File menu again and hover over Back up Company. Then select Create Local Backup.
3. In the window, select Local Backup and then Next.
4. In the Local Backup Only section, select Browse and select where you want to save your backup company file.
5. This runs a test to make sure your backup file is in good shape before you save.
6. When you're ready, select OK.
7. Select Save it now and Next.

Check this article for more information: Back up your QuickBooks Desktop company file.

Let me know if you need anything else.

McKenzieBieker,

We have edited a prior payroll (6/24) paycheck after completing the steps to include the COVID-19 sick pay payroll items.  We now see a Worksheet 1.

I don't think the 941 and Worksheet 1 are correct though based on the guidelines from the IRS on FFCRA.  Worksheet 1, Step 2a is populating correctly.  But then there is a credit in 2a(i) for the same amount??  I don't think this is right.  So my total for Step 2 "nonrefundable portion of qualified sick and family leave wages" is zero.  Then Worksheet 1, Step 3c is populated with the same value of the sick wages.  This line is for wages paid Mar 13 to Mar 31.  So it is giving me 50% of the wage value as a retention credit that is feeding into Line 11c on Form 941.  This can't be right, or am I just not understanding the FFCRA tax credits properly?

McKenzieBieker,

We have edited a prior payroll (6/24) paycheck after completing the steps to include the COVID-19 sick pay payroll items.  We now see a Worksheet 1.

I don't think the 941 and Worksheet 1 are correct though based on the guidelines from the IRS on FFCRA.  Worksheet 1, Step 2a is populating correctly.  But then there is a credit in 2a(i) for the same amount??  I don't think this is right.  So my total for Step 2 "nonrefundable portion of qualified sick and family leave wages" is zero.  Then Worksheet 1, Step 3c is populated with the same value of the sick wages.  This line is for wages paid Mar 13 to Mar 31.  So it is giving me 50% of the wage value as a retention credit that is feeding into Line 11c on Form 941.  This can't be right, or am I just not understanding the FFCRA tax credits properly?  My first employee COVID sick time was in late May/early June.

I think I should see Worksheet 1 Step 2d have a balance that is the wages and the employer medicare tax, and that should pull to line 11b on Form 941.  Am I wrong?

McKenzieBieker,
We have edited a prior payroll (6/24) paycheck after completing the steps to include the COVID-19 sick pay payroll items. We now see a Worksheet 1.
I don't think the 941 and Worksheet 1 are correct though based on the guidelines from the IRS on FFCRA. Worksheet 1, Step 2a is populating correctly. But then there is a credit in 2a(i) for the same amount?? I don't think this is right. So my total for Step 2 "nonrefundable portion of qualified sick and family leave wages" is zero. Then Worksheet 1, Step 3c is populated with the same value of the sick wages. This line is for wages paid Mar 13 to Mar 31. So it is giving me 50% of the wage value as a retention credit that is feeding into Line 11c on Form 941. This can't be right, I should have a value on Line 11b, not 11c on Form 941.

My business didn't deal with any March wages, so I am not sure how that all works and populates, but if you have the Payroll List Items built and recorded correctly for FFCRA wages between April 1 and June 30, the Worksheet 1 should automatically calculate the credits.

In our situation, we paid FFCRA wages in June. So, on our Worksheet 1, these wages showed up on Line 2a. and in the total of 2a(i). Line 2c. will show the calculated Medicare amount. The grand total for these items will show up on 2d.  We didn't have any health costs claimed, so this figure was also the total on 2i and line 2j. This total will flow back to line 11b. on your 941 as a nonrefundable credit.

You should also be seeing the total FFCRA wages listed on line 5a (i) Column 1. Column 2 should be automatically figured for the savings on Social Security.

Hints and Tips for dealing with the extraordinarily confusing issues with QuickBooks and the 941!!!

I realize it is a little late, but better late than never. If you have been banging your head against the wall like I have (starting with the bug where the social security subject wages didn't populate onto the 941) trying to use the new 941 to report data with regards to the CARES act... in my case, the lesser well known Employee Retention Credit (ERC). The following are my experiences with QB Desktop.

-------------

Q: Why can't I just click 'override' on the fields on the 941 to enter figures I've been tracking manually outside of quickbooks?

A: Very good question. If you were like me and decided to track employee wages and company health contributions in a spreadsheet (like, maybe because qb didn't offer a way to track this in qb for weeks into the quarter), you will find great dismay to find out that you can not just click override on the fields on the 941 to enter your data. Whoah is me. Guess this means I have to go back and reinvent (or re-setup) the wheel and track ERC wages and health contributions in my payrolls... But keep reading - Once you have entered any data that flows into this portion of the form, suddenly Worksheet 1 appears at the end of your 941 and YOU CAN OVERRIDE THE FIELDS IN WORKSHEET 1 and it will flow into the 941. However the Worksheet 1 will not appear unless you have some data in qb flowing into it. (Grrrrrrrr.)

Q: How do I setup payroll items to flow into Worksheet 1 on the 941?

A: See Quickbooks' instructions here, but use them as a template for your existing setup........ I had no sick leave or FFMLA, just ERC (or "CARES Retention Credit" as labeled here). Follow these instructions to setup the Employee Addition and the Health Contribution. You HAVE to set them up as an "Addition" and "Company Contribution" respectively, or else the proper tax tracking option will not show up. I decided to dump the transactions into an existing COVID relief account I had already setup, but that is your choice. 

N.B. In the Employee Addition instructions, step 7 says to leave tax tracking alone. That presumes that you will follow the instructions at the bottom about how to run payroll, effectively not paying your people through the wages portion up top, but just through this single addition.  That doesn't work for me. I have different account codes, pay types, workers comp codes, etc to worry about. This only works if you have the simplest of setups. Read the bottom section about processing payroll and if that makes your toenails curl like mine did, don't be afraid to change that up and...

Remove all checkboxes next to taxes in step 7. Then, rename this item to CARES ERC Eligible Wages ADD. Then create a deduction and call it CARES ERC Eligible Wages DED, have it hit the same accounts, have it NOT touch anything having to do with the CARES Retention Cr.-Emp tax tracking bit, and then when it comes time to record eligible wages, add and deduct the same amount from each payroll item in the Other Payroll Items section on the check. (I tried to skip the deduction step and make it the same as the health portion and call it an addition but it wouldn't let me select CARES Retention Cr.-Emp if I did that. .

--- Now if you go into a single paycheck and add either the Wages (add and deduction) or Health lines, when you run the 941 magically Worksheet 1 will appear and you can click override and suddenly everything will flow into your 941 for you.

Breathe a sigh of relief, as yes finally now you can see a way to file!!!

But if putting fake or incomplete data in an account just to force quickbooks to show you a form or override button doesn't sit well with you, read on... As I mentioned, I kept track of my eligible wages and health insurance premiums (and withheld taxes and 7200 requests etc) on a spreadsheet. I decided to go into each employee's last paycheck of the quarter and enter the sum of the data in the proper payroll items there, so now there is a backup for the data on my spreadsheet. Which leads me to this tip...

TIP: You do not have to modify every paycheck in the quarter to track the credit. You can just put the cumulative quarter data in the final check of the quarter for that individual. 

N.B. You will have to UNLOCK Net Pay and you may have recalculated taxes. On the checks that wanted to change the tax, I took a screenshot of the original check's taxes amounts, added the CARES tracking items, and then readjusted the tax items to match the original calculation. 

TIP: You can check your work (and balances) by running a "quick report" for the payroll item from the View / Edit Payroll Item List -- select the payroll item and hit ctrl-q (or select Reports at the bottom and choose quick report). 

Q: Why doesn't quickbooks track the maximum $10,000 or wages and or health contributions?

A: Probably because there really isn't a precedent like this and they had to create something that works inside the current structure of the programming. I've always found quickbooks' handling of limits to be... finicky (or at least difficult for me to comprehend). And in this case, I don't know how you would link the Wages AND Health together to get a single max of $10,000 per employee. If we were just tracking one item, then yes we could do this. Also, the IRS forms sets up QB for failure... they ask you to record the wages separate from the health contributions as separate line items on Worksheet 1 (lines 3A and 3B). Even though those lines just get totaled and sent to the 941 as a single number, and the worksheet isn't transmitted to the IRS! So could you setup your own tracking and just enter gross number and set quickbooks to limit to $10,000 per employee? Sure probably. Will there be consequences later? ........ I'm tracking them both separately myself.

Don't forget to setup your tracking of your liability reductions! In my case, I setup an item named CARES Retention Credit -> New Payroll Item, Custom Setup, Other Tax, User-Defined Tax & Tax is paid by the company, CARES Retention Credit, change liability and expense account to your CARES account (Yes, same account), Tax tracking type None, .........

I had previously recorded my 941 tax transmissions with an Expense item for COVID Credits, but that's not how they wrote to do it here, so I deleted those and put it on the Liabilities section as a negative number. I went through and updated all of these. Honestly I'm not sure if it made a difference or not, but I did it. 

I think we can all agree that communication on this from ALL PARTIES - IRS, Intuit/Quickbooks, etc has been lacking. And all this during a time that is presenting some of the biggest challenges we may face with our businesses. 

Do you wish Quickbooks would make information like this available to us? Click "Cheer" and show them how much you appreciate straight talk and answers about these issues, not just "You're asking about the ERC? Here's how to handle the PPP!" garbage or instructions that tell you to do things that only work for the simplest of setups and don't warn you of any "gotchas"! Cheer and be heard!!! Thanks and good luck. 

I found a work around. You will put the qualified wages in the 1st quarter option on the interview form and once you complete the signature portion, the worksheet 1 would magically appear. Then you can override your 2nd quarter wages and go back to the interview form and remove the wages for 1st quarter.

Well, so much for my post... I'm now realizing that my qages as reported on 941 Line 2 are higher than they should be. If you tick the box for your ERC Wages Addition item to be the type that summons this form, it counts it as wages. And you are supposed to REMOVE wages from the WAGES part of the payroll check.

Which means that you can not divide wages between accounting codes. Can not track workers compensation codes. Can not deduct overtime wages from workers comp wages. In fact, does this even create a legal pay stub?

Looks like trying to do this "the right way" in quickbooks is not supported.

The message here that says to type in a value for the previous quarter to trick it into showing you the worksheet 1 is an excellent tip. Don't bother with trying to have quickbooks do the right thing. They are not setup for it.

And yes, this was just verified by a call with a qb support agent who verified everything and said yes, you can't do it this way if you do workers comp etc.

So this "solution" from quickbooks breaks all the other payroll functions we're relying on.

Not cool.

OK so as I mentioned, I found my workaround was double counting wages. I decided to delete all the ERC Wages from my payroll and just have the Health portion of ERC in quickbooks. That item does not get counted as wages, but still allows data to flow through to the 941. I then have to manually adjust the amounts on the 941 Worksheet 1 to match with my personal spreadsheet.

I also found quickbooks was double counting wages. I figured out this was due to the interview page that opens up when you first launch the form, which asks you to enter any wages for which you are claiming credit under cares act provisions. The key is to LEAVE THESE LINES BLANK! (I think the interview question about claiming wages for the tax credit must have been included for people who ran payrolls without setting up the covid-related payroll items and accounts.) If you have set up your payroll correctly, quickbooks will automatically enter your covid wages into the worksheets and make all the adjustments to the taxable amounts. It took me a long time to figure this out, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that quickbooks had correctly prepared my 941, including worksheet 1, without need for overrides.  By the way, the column 1 taxable amounts for social security and medicare will be different because covid wages are excluded from the social security wages and included in medicare wages. For social security, covid wages are listed separately on line 5a(i) or 5a(ii), subject only to the employee portion of FICA. If you have 401k deferrals, the taxable amount on line 2 will also be different, because it includes covid wags but excludes salary deferrals. There you have it, clear as mud!

Thank you for sharing your experience and giving us all another data point.

Unfortunately for me, I did not fill out the interview questions so that was not the source of my double counting.

In my case, it has to do with the way quickbooks has setup the "official" way to track wages. They require that you track it in the Other Payroll Items instead of in Earnings. That could work if you don't use quickbooks to track things like department payroll costs, workers comp accruals on wages, or anything else that goes beyond just the simplest quickbooks payroll setup of "payroll expenses" and "payroll liabilities" for just a few employees. They want you to REMOVE the dollars from the earnings portion and put them into the Other Payroll Items. 

I have over 200 payroll items to track different departments, union vs non union, etc, and then also regular time, overtime, double-time, vacation time, sick time, holiday pay, commissions, spiffs, ... all these different things. And they HAVE to be in the Earnings area.

But because quickbooks only allows you to create the COVID Cr type in an earnings item, you are forced to enter what they count as wages into an earnings category. And then there is no good way to take out the earnings. At least not that I have found. 

I also am afraid if the paycheck stubs generated by this method are compliant with the law on what must be on a stub... if they want the wages only reported as a single item in the other details, how are you supposed to show your employee their hours AND earnings for regular time, overtime, etc? I know that doesn't fly in California -- you have to provide certain things on the pay stub. I presume hours and overtime calculations is a requirement across all the US. 

Running your business during COVID-19 can be a bit confusing, but rest assured, we're here to help, jeffreydn. 

Thanks for providing such detailed information as to what happened to your payroll. The Tax Form 941 will populate automatically its data based on the paychecks you've entered in QuickBooks. See How QuickBooks Populates The 941? article for more details. 

On the other than, we require our clients to track it in the Other Payroll Items instead of in Earnings when adding the FFCRA payroll items. This ensures you to accurately record the employees paid leave and track the tax liabilities to get the proper reimbursement.

To learn more about this one, check out the How to track paid leave and sick time for COVID 19 article.

When it comes to reviewing the employee's hours, wages, and overtime, it would be best to contact our Payroll Support Team. They'll pull up your account in a secure environment and give you input on entering the payroll information accurately.

Here's how to reach them:

1. Click the Help icon on the top menu. 
2. Choose QuickBooks Desktop Help. 
3. Tap Contact us.
4. Select Search for something else and enter your concern in the Tell us more about your question: field. 
5. Tap Search. 
6. Choose Start a Message or Get Phone Number to connect with our support. 

Visit our Payroll Help Articles page for more insights about managing your payroll in QuickBooks.

The Community will always have your back if you need a hand with running payroll reports or any QuickBooks related. Have a great day ahead. 

Actually, no you are not here to help. First with your sad excuse of a canned response. This issue is not about FFCRA - paid leave or sick time. It is about the ERC. 

And I did contact tech support and was put in touch with a specialist who understood exactly all the issues. And she agreed, that you could not do the other basic necessity functions of payroll or even be in compliance with the law by following the instructions quickbooks has put out.

jeffryedn--

how right you are! I ended up with about 8 "Covid" accounts--from "covid reg wages" to "covid ot" to "covid incentive"etc etc".  Quickbooks response to this issue presumes we are all idiots and is insulting.  I spent an entire week re-entering 2nd qtr payroll using their guidelines--only to make my 941 correct--but still using wages account and the MANY category of wages--ot, reg, vacation, incentive etc only to find in end because they are not earnings but "additions" that QB has you set up covid accounts I have no hours on reports. THey show up on paystubs but not reports. So now in for my year end insurance audits I am once again re-creating the wheel to get the hours and the "quantities" added together to get total hours worked.  I have always been a fan of quickbooks-recommending it to anyone--but have they made me re-think this issue.  They feel short on this one HORRIBLY!  And the sad part is they can't even simply say--you are going to have to re-enter the entire quarter of payroll how we tell you or you are out of luck on 941. They give you instructions repeatedly that  tell you "this is how we pull numbers for 941".  We know this has been hard for everyone, but QB trying to take control of 941 is infuriating. QB is not responsible for our 941.  

Enough of rant--I got over it way back last week of June first week of July when ready to file and had to deal with this. Feel sorry for you last minute people figuring out how messed up QB has this!

So no one found a solution to overriding the Retention Credit wages except totally deleting the payroll and re-entering it with new payroll items, correct?  Is everyone just doing a 941 online and sending that in, not going through QuickBooks for this one?

It can be found on page 13 of the instructions to the 941 on the IRS website.

I have called tech support for ProAdvisors several times regarding this and have not yet received a satisfactory answer!  Was told TWICE I would receive a return call - didn't happen...QBO is even worse - no one there seems to have answers!  So very frustrated with tech support lately!

This is a huge problem. It is being corrected? I'm paying for a service to make filing returns easier. If I have to print my own forms and complete them outside of QuickBooks, your service isn't working.

Worksheet 1 has to be a fillable Form and if the numbers are pulled from payroll, there needs to be an override capability. That today is the filing deadline and this isn't corrected is unacceptable.