How do I enter a new clergy with all of his pay going to housing allowance and none to salary?

Good day, @Hartreasurer.

Thanks for visiting the Community. I can walk you through the steps in setting up housing allowance for a clergy member in QuickBooks Online.

There are two pay types for Clergy housing allowances, Cash and In-kind. Cash is used if the church provided funds to the pastor to pay their housing. In-kind would apply if the church pays the housing and other expenses on the pastor's part.

Here’s how to set it up in QuickBooks:
1.    Go to Workers from the left menu and select Employees.
2.    Locate and select the employee.
3.    Click the Pencil icon next to Pay to edit it.
4.    On the How much do you pay Employee? section, click the Pencil icon.
5.    Then, click on Even more ways to pay Employees drop-down arrow and select Clergy Housing(Cash) or Clergy Housing(In-kind).
6.    Hit Done to save the changes.

Once done, you should now be able to create payroll with just the housing allowance.

That should answer your question for today. Please reach out to me if you have questions, I’ll be more than happy to help. Thanks for coming to the Community and take care!

My problem comes in entering a new employee.  Not editing an existing employee.

When I enter How Much Do You Want To Pay Employee and click on Other Ways To Pay, then enter a housing allowance amount I get a message that wants me to fill in something for Salary.  I want this to be blank.  QuickBooks is not allowing the Salary area to be blank.

Thank you for coming back and providing extra details, @Hartreasurer.

Allow me to step in for a moment and share some more insights about adding and setting up an employee in QuickBooks.

Currently, the option to override a salary amount or make it blank is unavailable. As a workaround, you could change the pay type of the employee to hourly, so you can make adjustments.

The calculation may vary depending on the pay schedule. For more details, please refer to this article: Override an employee's salary in Online Payroll. We also advise discussing this to your employee so they understand how their pay is being computed.

Here are the steps in overriding the employee's hours:

1. Click Workers.
2. Select Run Payroll.
3. Select the pay schedule of the employee.
4. Select Continue.
5. Select the employee.
6. Under Salary, select the hours worked.
7. Select adjust Salary this time only.
8. Enter the hours of unpaid time off.
9. Select Apply.

That should do it, Hartreasurer. Please know that I'm still here to help you further if you have more questions about payroll. Just add a comment below.