Why are payroll expenses not categorized by the classes selected in timesheets?

Hey Ben,

I've been bashing around in a trial of QBO to see if it's a good fit for our internal job tracking system and I believe I have finally figured out an unorthodox yet practical way around this issue. Fingers crossed!

In KEYPAY payroll, the only extra tracking attributes (per time entry) that get pulled in from imported QB time-sheets are 'Work Type' and 'Location'. As we only have one office Location and we track transactions by Project then by Project Stage (Class), the Location field was redundant for us and provided an opening. Even if you need to use locations, our method still works with a few tweaks by using nested lists.

To get the journal entries for payroll to show the correct Class as per the time-sheet data entry, we set up a QB 'Locations' list to replicate our Class list (Project Stages), then imported this list via the payroll settings where we then specified a corresponding Class for each specific location. To check this, once a payrun is finalised, the imported payroll Journal entries will now be allocated according to the correct timesheet entry class and can be tracked accordingly.

For our COGS to reflect accurate payroll expenses according to each branch of our services, we then had to specify location specific accounts in the payroll settings. To avoid this becoming a headache of inherent redundancy, we initially set up the pseudo 'Locations' list as a nested tree under our actual main office Location with 'sub-locations' according to our separate 'services provided'. These then branched off into further 'sub-locations' for specific tasks or stages (ie our classes list) and the nesting continues on in this way.

Hope that all makes sense!

Surely QB will sort this out eventually but in the interim, this workaround method appears to work well and we are now able to accurately track labour on Jobs as was totally impossible before.

Cheers!

Edit: Extra step added to the above....

To maintain Job Tracking capability, and ensure payroll expenses accrued for each Project / Name are reflected in the Journal entries exported by KEYPAY, you also have to modify relevant line items (now grouped by class within the Journal Entries) to re-associate them to the correct 'Name' / Project. This is very simple if only one Name / Project has been used per class in the scheduled payroll (and associated time-sheets) but if not, the Journal line item has to be re-entered according to the correct Name / Project split which is simply a matter of comparing data on the time-sheets with the data on the payslips to allocate the split accordingly (use both reports to do this to ensure your separated and revised class totals match the original payroll bulk export totals).