How to Set Up QuickBooks Payroll Time Tracking (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Time tracking by hand is a total waste of time. So today I'll teach you how to use the time tracking apps in QuickBooks Payroll to set up a kiosk for your team to clock in and out, create shift schedules, and give your team time tracking access on the go. I'm David. I've partnered with QuickBooks Online to create this comprehensive tutorial. So head to the website below and follow along with me. First, let's pick the right plan for you. Now, all three of these plans have full service payroll. That means paying payroll taxes for you, setting up benefits, time tracking, and the works. Payroll Premium gives you same-day direct deposit and enables time tracking in the mobile app. That enables you to make shift schedules and approve time sheets from anywhere. This also gives you location tracking when employees are clocked in. Looking over at Payroll Elite, that gives you advanced project management features and job progress. It also gives you a nice feature in that you can remind your team to clock in and out when they enter or leave a job site. With Elite, QuickBooks also guarantees up to $25,000 of protection if you get a penalty on your payroll taxes. For this video, we'll choose Payroll Premium as the most popular option. Remember, for all three plans, there's a base monthly fee and a fee per employee. Click Choose Plan With Me to move forward. Next up, you can choose one of the four accounting plans. Check the video in the top right if you wanna learn more about accounting. You can also opt out and click this button, Continue Without Accounting. For this video, I'll stick with the Plus Plan. It gives us a few more features in time tracking, which I'll point out. Fill in your email address, password, and phone number, and then click the Create an Intuit Account button, and I'll get you started on the other side. After some onboarding questions, you have made it to the homepage. Let's give you a quick introduction. So on the left side of the screen, you'll see the navigation bar. That's how you'll get to all the different subsections or apps within QuickBooks. You can find all of those apps under the All Apps button. You can also pin specific apps in the bottom left. To change your pinned apps, click the Customize button. For this video, I'll focus on Payroll and Time. So let's pin those, and then unpin all of the accounting apps and click Save. Payroll shows up here, and Time goes underneath it. Now, before we jump into time tracking, there's some initial setup required for Payroll. Let's go through that together by moving your mouse to Payroll and then clicking the Overview link. Now, if you've already set up Payroll, skip ahead to the timestamp on screen. If you've already paid your employees this year, click Yes to this question. Otherwise, click No. I'll click No for this demo because we're not focusing on Payroll today. You can then change your first payday with QuickBooks. Let's make it next Friday and then click OK. From here, confirm your primary business address, then click Next. Next, put the contact information of the person who will run Payroll for you. If this is you, congratulations, because with great power comes great responsibility. Next, we're going to add an employee and invite them to the QuickBooks Workforce app. If you're on the Overview tab with me and you see the Start button by Tell Us About Your Team, you can click that. Or if you don't see that, you can go over to the Employees button and then click on Add an Employee. We're only gonna add a single employee today. If you wanna add more than a couple at once, check out our full Payroll tutorial up in the top right. So Megan Bowen works at my donut shop, so I'm gonna add her here. First name, last name, email, and hire date. And then the important stuff is down below. We're gonna let Megan self-onboard in QuickBooks Workforce. That's the mobile app that does time tracking. Make sure you check Time Tracking down below, and remember, this is only available on Payroll Premium and higher. And when you're satisfied with your entries, click Add Employee. Next, we need to complete her payroll information and she needs to accept the invite to Workforce. So let's quickly go through what you need to finish her payroll info. Okay, let's get some more screen real estate by clicking this Hide Menu button first. Next, you'll need to fill in the rest of this form for full payroll, but the most important thing for time tracking is to make sure base pay is set up. Let's start by making her hourly. I'll set up her rate per hour here, and then it is important to set up account mapping and even default working hours. I definitely recommend you check out our full payroll tutorial. Again, you can find it in the top right. Now, your employees will get an email like this when you invite them to Workforce. First, they need to accept the invite. If they've not created an account yet, they'll need to do so. Then they'll need to fill in a bunch of information to make sure that they get paid. I will skip through this off camera since it's not the focus of today's tutorial. Once they finish the setup steps, they can download the Workforce app to track time on the go. Links are included in the top right for both iOS and for Android. Here we are inside the QuickBooks Workforce app. Employees can do all sorts of things here like check how much time they've clocked in for today, check their latest pay stub, and see their upcoming shifts at work. The really basic thing to do here though is to track time. Employees can do that by tapping the track time tab at the bottom of the screen. There are two ways to clock in. First, you can tap that plus button in the bottom right to add time in the past. This is pretty straightforward. You set the start time, you set the end time, you set any of these fields, especially those that are required, we'll cover those in just a bit, and then click add to save it to your timesheet. Alternatively, your employees can tap the big green button to clock in before they get to work. This can also capture your employee's location, but this is entirely optional. When they're done, they can clock out by tapping the clock out button. Now let's look at how those timesheets show up for you. Here we are back on the ClickBooks homepage. This time I'll select all apps, then move my mouse to time and then click on approvals. Here you'll see a list of your employees timesheets. If you don't see any, that either means your employees haven't submitted any timesheets or you've got the wrong date range. When you click on an employee's timesheet, you'll see the specific clock in and clock out times as well as any settings that they changed for each period. Now to approve these timesheets, you can either click the approve time button here or wait to approve once you run payroll. Those are really the basics, but now let's see how you can customize this for your business. So we're back inside the time app, this time on the overview tab. So the first setup task on this page is to customize your employees timesheets. When you click start, you'll see all of the possible fields you can make them set. Here's what they mean one by one. Customer is the customer you're doing the work for. Billable allows you to track time that you should invoice your customers against. Class is a general purpose category. You can use this in a number of different ways like what kind of work was this time spent on? Services is the specific service provided, we saw that earlier. And notes are free form texts that your employees can use for any reason. Those will show up on their timesheet. Let's add class to the mix and then click next. Leave this first item checked, that's how your team can log their hours on the go. And then you can choose whether they can update their timesheets without reaching out to you. We'll cover kiosks a bit later in the video. Click next to commit your changes. Now if you need further customization, don't worry, let me show you what you can do. Click the gear icon in the top right of the screen to open your settings pane. Then click on account and settings. Then click on time, it's the second to last option on the left. You'll see timesheet fields and custom fields. The timesheet fields looks very similar to the screen we were just on. But here you also get to add a location field. This actually shows up as department in the app instead of location, that can be confusing unless you know that. If you have multiple locations, this is a good field to use. Let's commit these changes by clicking save. Now you can also select your own fields by clicking custom fields. To add a field, click the add custom fields button and name your field. Make sure time is selected for the category and then select the data type. You can make your fields freeform text, numbers, or a dropdown list of your choice. You can choose up to 100 options, although I would never recommend that for anybody and then click save when you're done. You'll see your field shows up in the list here, click save once again. Now before we forget, we've set up classes and locations, but we haven't created them yet. To do that, click on the gear icon in the top right and then click on all lists. You can modify your list of classes by clicking classes and you can modify your list of locations by clicking departments. Once your employees start using these fields, you'll see them pop up in their timesheets. Information like class, location, and custom fields, you can view by clicking on an individual time entry. That sums up custom fields. Let's head out of this view and talk about employee breaks. Move your mouse over to all apps, then time, then overview. To set up breaks, go to the end of your setup task list and click start next to pick the advanced features you need. In the top left, we see set up lunches and breaks. I'll add the rest of these for good measure and then click done. We'll scroll back down to see the advanced time tracking list and then click start next to set up lunches and breaks. And check this out. It brings us back to our time settings. Breaks is just under custom fields, so let's click the pencil icon to modify them. Here's what QuickBooks can do with breaks. Definitely set the name and the time first, if only for your own sanity in tracking this stuff. Then what's most important is down below. Is this an automatic break, a manual break, or both? With automatic breaks, you describe when they occur. Most frequent is at the middle of a shift or at a specific time. You can also set on what days of the week this break is active and how far into an employee's shift this shows up. Manual breaks have their own settings too, which basically give you control over whether the total break time you set above is strictly enforced or not. Just like with custom fields, you can click save to add breaks here. Make sure to note that you can assign different employees to different break types here. When you're done, click close to head back to your settings. The only other setting we'll go through here is geolocation. You can make location optional, so employees decide whether they share location when they're clocked in or not. You can also choose not to track it or to make it required for clocking in. If you change this, it takes effect almost immediately in the app. Back on the overview tab, let's finish up the last of the advanced settings. Remember how your employees can select a customer before they clock in? Well, you can restrict which customers each employee has access to by clicking start next to assign team members to customers. To do that, click on a customer and then uncheck assign to all team members. You can then click edit to assign that customer to only specific team members. The team members you check here will be the only ones who can see this customer when they clock in. Now let's wrap up customization by talking about timesheet approvals. If you have multiple levels of management, you might want your managers to have access to approve timesheets. Click start next to select managers who can approve time to do that. This launches a classic version of QuickBooks Time where you can add managers to approve timesheets. To do that, click the button groups and managers and then click add group. Give a name to this group. This might be a team name or a department and then click save. Then to add someone to this group, click close and then click on that employee's name. You'll see a much more advanced settings dialogue come up. Look about 80% down the page and you should see a group option. Select the dropdown there and select the group. To add someone as a manager who can approve that group's timesheet, click on manage group and managers and then click on managers. That's quite a mouthful. Type the name of the manager and then click add once you select them. This way, managers can manage and approve timesheets, manage user accounts, shift schedules and run reports. While we're here in the classic QuickBooks Time app, we can also set up a kiosk for time tracking. To set that up, move your mouse to feature add-ons in the left sidebar, click on it and then click on time kiosk. Let me zoom in so you can see this clearly. Now you'd set up a kiosk if you want a centralized place in your office for your employees to clock in and out. All you need is a dedicated computer or tablet. To get started, click the add device button and then click use this computer. First, set the kiosk name to something you'll remember. This is especially important if you'll have multiple kiosks across multiple locations. You can require a photo on clock in or clock out that you can review in timesheets when you approve them. You can also record location. This is more useful when the kiosk is actually mobile. You can also choose whether your employees clock in by choosing their name from a list by clicking show here or having to type their name in explicitly by checking hide. And if you show that member list, you can also choose whether to show the working status of each employee next to their name in the list. Let's save these settings and launch the kiosk. In kiosk mode, we chose to have employees in a list. That means John or any other employee can tap on their name and they'll be prompted to create a pin if it's their first time. This discourages people from clocking in or clocking out for other employees. Once you create your pin and click next, you can clock in or clock out. Just click your name again and then type in your pin. If you're required to select a customer, you can select that customer here, then click clock in. Now, if you have photos enabled on the kiosk, it'll take a photo of you now and then you're good to go until you clock out. You'll also get signed out of this view if you've been inactive for too long. The default sign out length is 20 seconds. Finally, we've got to cover shift schedule. So let's head back into QuickBooks time and let me show you how it works. Okay, we are back in QuickBooks time. This time, click on schedule under time. To add a shift, click any cell within the table. Set the start time and the end time first, and then you can worry about adding team members. So let's start by making this shift eight hours instead of four. Then we can add the rest of the team by clicking the team members box. You can click each member one by one until they all appear in the list. You can also see the groups we set up earlier, this kitchen group, but we're gonna add Megan as the final person in this shift. Now, it's not doing so hot with my Zoom level, but you can restrict this shift to a specific customer. More useful when you're tracking billable hours versus work at a coffee shop or a grocery store. You can also set this up for a specific location and add notes if you like. When you're done with a shift, I recommend you save the draft first before publishing. Wait till you're done setting up shifts for the entire week, then publish the entire week. That sends the schedule to all your employees. So you wanna make sure you get it right. Let's go ahead and publish this so our team can take a look. Here's how this looks inside the app. The employee just needs to tap on the schedule tab and then they see all their shifts assigned for the week. Now, if you have regularity to your weeks, you might wanna save your schedule as a template. To do this, check out the actions menu for a couple of handy tricks. You can save this week as a template so you can load it again next week. You can actually copy a previous week or you can subscribe to this as a calendar. That means you get a special URL and you can add that to your Google or Outlook calendar. Now, as of filming, some of those functions don't quite work on this view. That's because this is a migration from the schedule app in the classic QuickBooks time. To access it, enter the classic QuickBooks time app and then click on schedule. You'll see the same schedule and the same actions view. Just try it from here instead. Now, it's up to you to get started. Check out time tracking in QuickBooks Payroll using the link down in the description. I'm David and I'll see you in the next video.