Reading Your Check Register Reports
In this article
- Check Register General Overview
- What to Find on a Check Register
- Tax Totals - Employee vs. Employer
- Modifying and Filtering the Report
Check Register General Overview
The Check Register (S109) provides a detailed breakdown of all pay checks in the payroll run; including Employee Name, Rates of Pay, Hours Worked, Gross Pay, Taxes Withheld, Check Number, Check Date, Check Type, and Net Amount Paid. Report also will show current totals and Year To Date (YTD) amounts. This report can be sorted alphabetically or by employee ID and can be grouped by department or branch if preferred.
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What to Find on a Check Register
Along the top right you'll see the Check Date which is the effective date for any direct deposits along with the Period Range which should be the pay period. Week#'s are frankly more confusing than they are worth and are a legacy software setting that doesn't truly impact anything, but can be used as point of reference if needed.
Along the bottom you should see the time stamp for when the report was printed or created:
Along the top you should see in the grey scale the employee's name, EE Code#, the pay frequency, check number, check date, check type and the net pay of any live checks as opposed to net pay issued via direct deposit:
We try to cram a lot into this report, so at a glance your eyes may fool you into misreading the Current vs. YTD columns which are grouped into three categories Earnings, Deductions and Taxes:
Much of the information shown on this report is also shown on each pay stub; employee taxes are itemized Federal is for Fed withholding, OASDI stands for Old Age Survivors Disability Insurance aka Social Security, Medicare, and State CO for Colorado withholding or whichever state is applicable for your employee. The (M/2) in this sample is showing the withholding taxes were calculated based on an employee's W4 withholding election of Married & 2. Again columns are Current & YTD totals.
At the end of the report you should see a summary listing of the totals for the entire company. If you report is set to group by department, you may also see a department total summary. If an employee were to receive two checks in one run, you would see an employee summary of both payments. These summary areas should be shaded in a yellow color if viewed in PDF format.
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Tax Totals - Employee vs. Employer
The tax totals will show the breakdown of employee taxes & employer taxes. ER OASDI, ER Medicare, ER FUI & CO-SUI are the employer taxes in this sample. The total employer tax expense is $1,562.29 in this sample, whereas the employee withholding from their gross pay was $3,047.15. Combined tax total was $4,609.44 which you would be the amount impounded from the company bank account in this sample. Often employers may confuse their tax expense with that of the total impound. Keep in mind, employer's payroll expense is the combination of Gross Wages & Employer Taxes not Net Pay and Total Taxes.
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Modifying and Filtering the Report
This report can also be run across many payroll dates. When doing so you have many other settings and options. If you wish to show a summary of data by employee across many checks, you'll want to select "Show only Summary for Multiple check dates"
If you wish to only see a summary of all data for the entire company for that date range and do not care to see employee info individually, you can change the Group Type to "Summary" only. This shortens the report considerably.
In either case, when running across multiple pay runs you need to select the payroll check dates to include or "select all".
By default the reports module will display payrolls in the current quarter and/or year, but you can expand that across years and periods by changing the display settings.
Please keep in mind, when viewing the check register report across multiple calendar years it is best to reference the "Current" column totals only as the Year To Date totals get fooled by multiple calendar years being included in the report and will skew your results.
To see an example of how to run this report and other directly; view the videos in this help article.
If you have any questions, shoot us a line and we would be happy to help. There are loads of other reports we can provide or we can help you figure out which settings to use to get the results you desire.