DIY Payroll with Excel, Part III

Next Up: Doing the payroll calculations. As I said in the last few payroll posts, once you have the payroll setup done, you don't have to touch it again until you have tax rate changes, new employees or new pay rates. For the most part, this should be once or twice a year.

When you started this process from within Small Business Accounting, you were asked for a payroll period. This payroll period was used as the basis for bringing over timesheet/time-entry data and is used to form the basis of the payroll period calculations on the Run Payroll worksheet tab. If you don't see any hours on this worksheet, you don't have any time logged against the employees shown, or you don't use SBA's time logging capabilities. Either way, you can directly enter the hours on this worksheet (click to see the image as an example). If you do use SBA's time logging capabilities, and you realize that there is a problem with the hours, you can always toggle back to SBA (using Alt-Tab), make any changes to the timesheets and/or time-entries and then click the Update Employees and Hours from SBA button. This will ensure you have the latest data from SBA without having to restart the process. Note, the calculations are done automatically, so really all you need to provide are the correct hours.

Finally, once you are satisfied with the information, you can check the pay stubs by clicking on the Pay Stubs worksheet tab. Again, these are filled in and automatically calculated using the setup information per employee and the pay run details. Back on the Run Payroll worksheet tab, click the Create Checks in SBA button.

Finalizing the pay run in the next and final Payroll post...