P.S. This would not be an issue if another basic feature was working in such a way that a reasonable user would expect.

Fun fact: Inactive Payroll Items that convey from previous usage are still accepted when creating paychecks!!  Without so much as a warning!!!  Seems reasonable, doesn't it???

RE: Deleting a single item and its associated salary amount (which is the same across all items for salary, of course) will delete the salary amount from all payroll items.  The software for some reason assumes that assigning a blank dollar amount to a blank item that you're trying to delete means you want a blank salary for that employee.

It's an unfortunate case of QB trying to make all the salary amounts the same. It should work better than it does.

Still, you can avoid the issue by deleting the line/row in the earnings table instead of deleting the salary amount: Click on the undesired line in the earnings table and then either use the Ctrl-Del key combination or from the Edit menu pick Delete Line.

Hi Big Red. Thanks for the tip, I appreciate you taking the time to respond.  Cheers!

@jeffrecinc  RE: Fun fact: Inactive Payroll Items that convey from previous usage are still accepted when creating paychecks!! Without so much as a warning!!! Seems reasonable, doesn't it???

If you mean that you made a payroll item inactive on the payroll items list, then yes doing so has no effect other than making it inactive. That same is true in most cases with all lists: Making a record inactive makes it disappear from the list, when the list is in the mode to hide inactive records, but that's pretty much all it does.