Q & A: QuickBooks Employee Payroll Reimbursements & Job Costing

Job costing employee payroll reimbursements in QuickBooks is a function that many users want to perform and they usually expect that they can – with less than desired results.  Below is a question that I answered several years ago on the Intuit Community forum.

How do I link a employee payroll reimbursement to a customer’s job?  For example:

If an employee pays for something with a personal credit card and I reimburse him via payroll, how do I get that transaction to link to a customer’s job so it shows up in the Job Costs Detail report? When I reimburse an employee, for example, the debit shows up on my P&L under say, Landscape Materials, but how do I get that cost over to the job so I can see it in the Job Costs Detail or at least on a customer’s P&L?

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Here’s my answer:

Unfortunately you can’t job cost reimbursements that are run through payroll – QuickBooks just wasn’t designed to work that way.

To accomplish this you need to do the reimbursements outside of the payroll module, by either entering a bill in Accounts Payable or simply writing a check.

In the Vendor list create a new vendor, if the employee’s name is John J. Doe – create the vendor record as John Doe-Reimbursements.

You can then enter a bill in Accounts Payable for John Doe-Reimbursements and record the reimbursement to a specific account (or accounts) using the Expenses tab and assigning the proper Customer:Job OR you can use the Items tab, select the appropriate Service/Cost Code and select the proper Customer:Job.  You would then Pay the Bill.

If you don’t want create Vendor bill, another method to record this is to simply use the Write Check feature  and using either the Expenses or Items tab at the bottom of the check job cost out the reimbursements appropriately.

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