Import your employees and pay history from ADP, Gusto, or Paychex into QuickBooks Online Payroll

If you’re coming to QuickBooks Online Payroll from ADP, Gusto, or Paychex, you can import most of your employees’ info and pay history details to help you save time setting up your payroll.  

If you’ve already paid your employees this year, the imported pay history goes on your employees’ W-2s and other payroll tax forms so they’re accurate.

For a better experience, open this article in QuickBooks Online. Launch side-by-side view

Check out this video to see how the import works.

Upload your employees and pay history reports

1. Sign into QuickBooks Online as the primary admin. 
2. Go to Payroll, then select Overview. 
3. Select Start Onboarding.  If you’ve already started the setup, go to Tell us about your team in the task list. Select Start, or Finish Up, then proceed to step 5.
4. Fill in or answer the questions about your business and prior payroll.  
5. From What did you use to run payroll? select your prior payroll service (Run by ADP, Gusto, or Paychex). 
6. Select Next twice.
7. Select View step-by-step instructions to see how to get the specific employee and pay history reports required from your service to use for the upload. Then upload those specific reports.
8. Select Next.
9. Select each employee to add/review the following (if you have contractors, they’re on a different list):
   • Add Social Security numbers 
   • Add bank account info if they want direct deposit 
   • Add any additional info you want not listed on your reports
   • Review/update home and work location addresses (this helps with Step 14). 
10. Select Done.
11. Go to Payroll, then Overview.
12. Complete the Enter your tax info task if you haven’t already.
    • If you only uploaded employee info and haven't paid your employees yet this year, you're done!
    • If you uploaded pay history reports, continue to step 13.
13. From Bring in your payroll history, select Start. 
14. You may need to match your payroll items from your prior provider with the items available in QuickBooks Online Payroll.  Select Match on any items listed and select the pay item from the dropdown.
    • If you don’t categorize your payroll items here, you’ll have to manually add them and the year-to-date amounts to your employees later. 
    • If you don’t see the right QuickBooks tax item in the dropdown to match the Gusto/ADP/Paychex tax items, check your employees’ home and work locations.
15. Select Next, and then Proceed.
16. Select Edit to verify your year-to-date totals. You may also need to enter your FUTA (Federal Unemployment) totals for each quarter. 
17. Select Done.

Now you can finish your payroll setup (recommended) to set up direct deposit, and set up QuickBooks to automatically pay and file your payroll taxes and filings. If you need to pay your team immediately, you can run payroll using paper checks.