How long will Certified Payroll Solution setup take?

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What are setup requirements?  How difficult is Certified Payroll Solution to setup and use?

These are difficult questions to answer without "knowing" exactly how well you are currently utilizing QuickBooks®, how many employees you have, how many jobs you are currently working on, how familiar you are with QuickBooks, how familiar you are with certified payroll, etc.

Most of our customers find themselves using Certified Payroll solution by their next paycheck run; some can even use it the very first week they receive it.

After installing Certified Payroll Solution, you will have perhaps 30 minutes of initial setup.  This initial setup involves setting up your company's certified payroll reporting requirements and/or preferences - these are preferences that QuickBooks has no means of handling.

The bulk of the setup requirements are in QuickBooks, and a brief overview is provided below:

• The QuickBooks Time Tracking preference must be turned on.
• You must enter employee time using the Weekly Timesheet function.
• You must edit the job record of each prevailing wage job, and in the "Ship To" address block, enter your project number, project name, and project location.  You can even create a "filter" or "flag" for jobs requiring certified payroll reports.
• You must have specific payroll items that you use in your timesheets for when an employee works under multiple classifications; for example, when an employee works in the morning as a Laborer, and in the afternoon as a Carpenter.
• Paychecks/payroll must be issued in QuickBooks; using Intuit tax table subscriptions, Intuit Assisted Payroll, or done manually with the use of paper tax tables.
• You must have Microsoft Excel and Word installed on your computer in order to generate the completed reports.
  

If you watch the training videos we created (found in the Certified Payroll Solution Training, Support & Resource Center , on our Web Service Center where you download your software, OR provided on your installation CD), refer to your manual or the in-program help, for specifics that apply to your state's certified payroll reporting requirements; you should experience little to no trouble at all.
The first week that you run Certified Payroll Solution, you should figure that it will take nearly the same amount of time to complete the setup as it would to do the reports in the manner that you have previously done them.  The final setup is a one-time process and includes entering missing information about Employees, Jobs, Payroll Wage Items, and Payroll Deductions that QuickBooks has no means of tracking into "linked records" that the program automatically creates and walks you through.

After that, it will take 5-30 minutes to generate your certified payroll reports each week - again, this time frame will depend upon the number of employees, jobs, QuickBooks file size, computer, and printer speeds, etc.