Once you’ve set up health insurance as a Payroll Item, you can learn how to use QuickBooks’ Employee Defaults to enter premium information.
One of the benefits of QuickBooks is that once you’ve entered a number or name or preference, you don’t have to do so again. QuickBooks stores data that it knows may be re-used again and makes it available when you need it. This is called default information.
When you’re setting up payroll information, you’ll definitely want to establish these because of the repetitive nature of that task.
In the previous article, we wrote about adding a health insurance deduction as a Payroll Item. But that item doesn’t include any data about the amounts that will be deducted. To do that, you’ll need to set up defaults.
Open the Employee Center in QuickBooks and click the Manage Employee Information tab, and then Change New Employee Default Settings.
You can set up an Employee Default so that some or all employees have that deduction on their paychecks.
Click in the box under ADDITIONS, DEDUCTIONS AND COMPANY CONTRIBUTIONS, under ITEM NAME, as pictured above. Since you’ve already set up a Payroll Item for Health Insurance, that entry will appear on the list. If you hadn’t done so, you could click <Add New> and go through the setup process now.
Tab to the AMOUNT and LIMIT columns and enter those figures. Click OK.
This health insurance deduction will only apply to new employee records that you create. If the amount for any employee default will be different for some of them, you can leave the AMOUNT and LIMIT fields blank, then add them to the individual employee records. The same is true if you already have some employees entered in QuickBooks when you set up defaults.
Editing an Employee Record
If you do have existing employees when you enter the health insurance deduction default, or if you leave the AMOUNT field blank because the amounts may differ, you can go in and edit the employee record to reflect the correct amounts.
This window opens when you click on the QuickBooks employee record edit tool.
To do this, open the Employee Center and highlight the employee who needs the health insurance deduction data added. In the upper right corner, there’s an icon that looks like the tip of a pencil. This is your edit tool. Click it, and the record will open.
Click on the Payroll Info tab. In the ADDITIONS, DEDUCTIONS AND COMPANY CONTRIBUTIONS box, click where the first line would start below ITEM. An arrow should appear. Click it to open the drop-down box. Select your health insurance Payroll Item and enter the correct amounts in the AMOUNT and LIMIT fields. Click OK when you’re done.
QuickBooks Payroll has no room for guesswork. You should take a QuickBooks class if you’re at all unsure of how to proceed.
