As an additional tip to save money with QBO, I thoroughly encourage two things.    A. Set a scheduled event in your Outlook or Google Calendar or whatever it is you use for two years out. You are eligible for a loyalty discount once every two years, but you have to call in to get it.    B. You mentioned having Proadvisors on hand:  Get them to migrate your account to their wholesale billing account. You will get Essentials at $17.50 per month as long as you are under their billing.    There are a few things you should know about wholesale billing:    You will no longer be in control of your billing because your accountant will get billed by Intuit for your subscription and they will in turn bill you. If you call support for information or assistance with your billing, then you will have to do so with your accountant on the phone as well to at least give permission to discuss it with you. If you ever want to downgrade, upgrade or pretty much anything else subscription related, you will have to go through your accountant.    Once you invite someone as an accountant user, they have full access to your account just as though they were a Master Admin. Make sure you trust them implicitly.    If you are not already, (which it sounds like you are) MAKE them give YOU Master Admin rights. The owner of a company should almost always be the one with Master Admin rights in my opinion even if they never use the account. The reason is that the owner owns the business, sure. But the Master Admin is the one who owns the data inside the company file.    Draw up a contract between yourself and the ProAdvisor(s) that effectively states that in the event the two of you go your separate ways, they will immediately release your account from under their wholesale billing. Please note that when this happens, you will have to immediately provide your own billing information to keep the subscription from expiring.    I hope this helps!    Sincerely,    Your Personal Penguin ... View more

I just wanted to take a moment and expound a bit on what Khim was saying. She is absolutely correct on all points. I feel however it is important to mention a few other pieces of information.    Even during a full Quickbooks Desktop (QBDT) to Quickbooks Online (QBO) conversion, the payroll information very rarely comes over. It will usually just have the employee details, but no actual payroll information. The only time all of the payroll data comes over during a conversion is when everything in payroll is able to come over perfectly. This rarely happens for two reasons:   1. QBO uses the Percent method to calculate taxes, while QBDT uses the Wage Bracket method. A lot of times taxes will be off by a few cents and this will cause payroll not to migrate successfully.   2. QBO does not have all of the features QBDT has. If you are using a feature in QBDT that is not in QBO, then payroll will not migrate successfully.    The good news is that because of this, there is a known way around it and that is to enter Prior Payroll. All of the information you will need to enter Prior Payroll can be found on the Tax & Wage Summary report in QBDT and in the Payroll Summary Report in QBDT.    When you enter in Payroll as Prior information, it will not be applied to the accounting side of QBO. It will only affect the Payroll side. This is because when you enter in payroll as historical information, QBO assumes that you have already applied it to your register, so keep that in mind if this is not the case. Honestly, if the payroll checks have not already been applied to the register, your best bet may just to run backdated payroll in QBO, just make sure you do it as paper checks, not direct deposit. Additionally, if your client has already run payroll in QBO, you will be unable to enter prior payroll. Again, there are solutions:    1. If your client has only run payroll once or twice, does not have many employees and ALL of the checks were ran as paper checks, you can delete the checks out of payroll and then call Support. Support can then retrigger your ability to put in Prior Payroll.    2. Put in the missing payroll checks as backdated checks. Since Constructive Receipt says Uncle Sam doesn't really care about when employees worked for their money, they only care about when they got paid their money, you really only have to worry about getting the pay date right. So when you are backdating your checks if it will not let you change the Pay Period to the appropriate time frame, just remember that this is for recording purposes only. As long as the pay date is correct, you are good. If you really want the pay periods to be correct, support can help you out with that too once the paychecks have been entered with correct pay dates.    3. If you run into an error message while going through either of the above options, you can reach out to support and they can send it off to the payroll corrections team to be properly entered. You will need a spreadsheet detailing the Prior Payroll (Run the Tax & Wage Summary Report and the Payroll Summary Report for each quarter of 2018 and for each payroll ran during the current quarter and then export it to Excel). Please be aware that this process can take up to 5 business days and will depend on what they need to do, it can take longer.    This article will go into detail about how to enter prior payroll.    I hope this helps!    Sincerely,  Your Personal Penguin ... View more