How do I record a payment to an independent contractor? It’s an infrequent expense, but I’d like to add it correctly. Thank you!

Hi there, userallison. 

Thanks for dropping by, I'm more than happy to help you correctly record the payment for your independent contractor. First off, you'll want to set up their vendor profile and track them as a 1099 vendor. Once that is done, the next step is dependent on if you paid/pay them via direct deposit or paper check. Because you said it's an infrequent expense, I'll provide the steps for paper check and the link to the steps for direct deposit below.

Before you start, make sure you’ve set up your printing preferences.
Once you're set up:

1. Go to the the Payroll menu and select the Contractors tab.
2. Select the dropdown next to the contractor's name and then Write check.
   Settle unpaid bills with your contractor

   If you have any unpaid bills from the contractor, you can also pay that bill.

   Select Pay Bills to pay all or part of the open bill for the contractor. Then fill out the bill. Or select Pay Expenses to create a payment not related to an open bill.

3. Select the expense account you use to track paychecks from the Corresponding account in QuickBooks field. Note: This is the expense account on your chart of accounts where QuickBooks records the expense. It's not the bank account the payment debits from.
4. When you're ready to process the check, select Save and Close to send the check to your print queue. Or if you want to print the check now, select Print Check.

The steps, should you pay/paid them via direct deposit can be found here. 

If there's anything else I can help you with, feel free to post here anytime. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a nice day. 

Thank you so much. I was also confused about how to determine how much I owe to anyone on my payroll?

For example, this person contracts for me in another city when I just need someone to run by a client's house to measure something. So when I billed the client for that time, I put the contractor's name on the time activity, as they are billed out at a different rate. How do I add those bits of time when I am paying them? Or at the very least, how can I locate a list of that time that I can add manually? Feeling like there should be a simple way to do something like that...

You're welcome, @userallison.

I have some ideas to help make sure you're able to track your contractor's billable time.

First, please make sure to set up your contractor's vendor profiles as suggested by my peer above.

After that, we can turn on the time tracking feature in QuickBooks. To do this, we'll need to perform some tweaks on the Account and settings page. 

Here's how to do it:

1. Click the Gear icon, and then choose Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, and then go to the Time tracking section.
3. Click the pencil icon to edit, and then set your time tracking preferences.
4. Select Save, and then Done.
   

This time, you're ready to track your contractor's billable time. You've got two options on how to proceed. The first one is to create a timesheet through the +New button.

Here's how:

1. Click +New, and then choose either Single time activity or Weekly timesheet. In your case, the Single time activity option can be a perfect fit since you bill your contractors infrequently.
2. Select the contractor's name from the drop-down.
3. Enter the billable time.
4. Ensure to enter a billable rate, and then mark the Billable (/hr) checkbox.
5. Fill out other info needed.
6. Click Save and Close.
   

The second way is to create a time tracking only user through the Manage Users feature. For the detailed steps, please see this article: Set up time tracking in QuickBooks Online.

I can share a video tutorial for more insights about this. Head to this link for more info: How to Enter Billable Time for Contractors.

After tracking your contractor's billable time, you can access some related reports to monitor them. To do that, you can navigate through the Reports menu. Then, enter the search field any of the following: 

• Recent/Edited Time Activities, Time Activities by Customer Detail.
• Time Activities by Employee Detail, Unbilled time.

I can always share tips if you have more time tracking concerns. I'm here to lend a hand. Have a good one!