How to run QB USA Payroll

You give it a month's worth of payroll paperwork — ADP registers, ADP invoices and the insurance carriers' bills. It works out what every person cost, which company they belong to, and which account each part of that cost lands in. Then it checks its own answer six different ways before showing it to you.

Where each number comes from

This is the heart of the process. Different kinds of money are read from different documents, and never from the wrong one:

Words you will see

Drop them all in together. Meridian sorts them by what is inside them, not by what they are called — with one exception.

If a file is misnamed or missing, the run will tell you at this stage rather than producing an entry that is quietly short.

Before it can book anything, Meridian needs to know how to code every person who was paid. This screen shows you what it cannot answer on its own, and what it can answer but thinks you should see.

Prompts — you must answer these

Someone on this payroll cannot be coded yet: a new hire, or someone whose details changed. The run cannot go forward until every prompt has an answer. Each prompt states in plain words why it is being asked; that sentence is the whole point of the screen, so read it rather than pattern-matching on the name.

Alerts — you are being told, not asked

Someone's stored coding disagrees with what ADP sent this month. Meridian already has an answer and will use the stored one. The alert exists so a real change — a transfer, a promotion, a department move — does not slide past unnoticed. You can read them and carry on.

The choice that matters on every answer

The choice is shown at the control, never hidden behind a tooltip, because it is the difference between fixing a month and changing a record.

Meridian now shows you what it intends to book, and the result of six cross-checks. A gate adds the same money up two different ways, from two different documents, and compares. A gate that passes is silent; a gate that fails shows you the expected figure, the figure it got, and exactly who is responsible.

What a failure usually means

Meridian writes a plain-language explanation beside every failed gate. The common shapes:

Declaring a failed gate

A failed gate does not stop you permanently. When you have looked at it and are satisfied — a known reversal, a leaver on a carrier bill — you declare it, which records that a named person accepted it, at a time, on this run. The run cannot finish while a failed gate sits undeclared.

One month of input produces nine entries: for each of three payroll variants, two main entries — one per pay date — plus one accrual entry.

Each is labelled Main or Accrual on the results screen.

Before you upload anything

1. Check the tie-out strip: total debits must equal total credits.
2. Check that every failed gate you accepted is one you actually looked at.
3. Download the bundle from the button in the top right.
4. Load the entries into the accounting system the way you normally do.

The run stays in Runs permanently — its figures, its gates and who declared what — as the audit trail.

What each status means

Common questions