Any QuickBooks wizards here?

[Kraken]

I'm starting a new operating company under my corporate identity, Kraken Enterprises. I have a longstanding QB company file for Curio City. I want to create a separate company file for Blue Hills Editorial Services. I already created a new, blank company file, but I want to share the same bank accounts and credit card accounts as my Curio City company file.

Is that even possible, and if so, how do I do it? Rather than making a separate QB company file, can I set up a separate operating company within my Curio City company file? It's all going to go into Kraken Enterprises accounting -- as far as my CPA is concerned, it's all one company with one tax return -- but I'd like to track income and expenses for each operating company separately without having to run separate bank accounts.

[Kraken]

Just in case this ever comes up in search...it turns out to be very straightforward: Simply enable Classes in company preferences. Now you can assign every transaction to whatever divisions you want to track individually.

[Kraken]

Hello again, fellow QuickBooks users.

Effective today, MA is collecting a new payroll tax for PFML - Paid Family & Medical Leave. The payroll item is supposed to be broken into four percentage categories, two for employers and two for employees. As a company of one, I'm exempt from the employer contributions but do have to make the employee payments.

Fine. I went into the chart of accounts and added one deduction for the appropriate percentage to the appropriate state agency. However, my new item doesn't appear in the payroll detail (I use the offline, DIY desktop payroll, quickbooks pro 2016). I could not figure out how to make it appear in the paycheck detail's list of employee deductions.

This page from Intuit says:

A payroll update will be released in the later part of September.

You are required to set up the deductions for the employees and company contribution (if any) to comply with this tax. It will invoke an Add Payroll Item tool that will add four new payroll items.

Oh good, a wizard will handle that for me. So I deleted the single line item that I had manually added (and that refused to appear). Except it's now the beginning of October and the Add Payroll Item tool is not being triggered to add the four new payroll items.

I verified that I have autoupdate turned on with all categories selected, and I manually ran "update now" with no updates found. One line item shows a 404 Not Found error, but I don't think that's relevant. Help, Mr Wizard!

Should I just assume that Intuit is late with this update, and that it will still come automatically? I dated today's paycheck yesterday to get around the requirement, so I don't actually need this working until the end of this month. I am afraid to ask Intuit directly because (1) contacting them is difficult, and (2) if you do get through, they invariably try to upsell you to the latest version.

[Biyobi]

From what I understand, Quickbooks comes with three years worth of updates. Given your 2016 version, you may have aged out of getting them.

[Kraken]

Hah! Like I said, Intuit always tries to sell you the update.

The question, then, is: If I create the deduction categories myself, how do I activate them on the paycheck detail screen?

[Kraken]

I spent three hours today trying to run this down. I can create all four of the payroll line-items, but I still can't figure out how to make them appear on the necessary forms and reports. Many of the troubleshooters I found refer me to the Payroll Center, which one only gets if one subscribes to Intuit's payroll service (at $65/mo...yeah, no). Finally had to admit that I'm stumped.

As one last Hail Mary, I emailed my CPA, who's the closest thing to a QB wizard I've ever met. We'll see if he can crack it. If not, I fear that I'll have to cough up $200 to get QB 2020 -- all so that I can pay additional taxes. Grrrr.