Printing Pay Stubs From QuickBooks Desktop After the Payroll Service Ends
When the payroll service ends, staff lose the online stub portal; this guide shows how to keep issuing pay stubs and archiving pay history from Desktop.
The pay stub portal that came with Desktop payroll is a hosted service, not part of your company file. When the payroll service ends, employee logins to that portal stop working, and the history behind them is no longer guaranteed. The paychecks themselves stay put. Every one is a transaction in your file, and Desktop can still print it.
What breaks when the payroll service ends?
The portal, now called QuickBooks Workforce and formerly ViewMyPaycheck, sits on the vendor's servers and depends on a live payroll service. Cancel or lose that service, and staff can no longer log in to view or download stubs. Tax table updates and direct deposit stop as well. Calculation stops too: the program will not compute taxes on new paychecks until the payroll preferences are switched to manual calculations, which is unlocked through the in-product Help topic on manual payroll. None of this touches recorded data. Paychecks, year to date figures, and payroll items remain in the file, and printing them does not require the internet or the vendor.
Print stubs directly from the company file
Desktop has a built-in stub printer that most people never open. From the File menu, choose Print Forms, then Pay Stubs. Set the date range to cover the pay periods involved, and the window lists matching paychecks by employee. Tick the ones you need and click Print. A paycheck written on voucher check stock already printed its stub with the check, so this dialog serves reprints. Direct deposit pay is different: this dialog is the only place that stub exists on paper.
To produce files rather than paper, choose QuickBooks PDF Converter as the printer, and each stub saves as a PDF. If that converter is missing from the printer list, the PDF driver failed to install, and a repair install of the program usually restores it. What appears on the voucher is set in Edit, Preferences, Payroll and Employees, Company Preferences, Pay Stub and Voucher Printing. Configure it once, and every reprint matches.
Email stubs from your own mailbox
Emailing a stub is now a two step job that belongs to you. Print the stub to PDF, name it after the employee and the pay date, and send it from your own mailbox. Addresses live in the Employee Contact List under Reports, Employees and Payroll. Confirm each address before sending, because a stub carries personal details and a wrong address delivers them to a stranger. Send one recipient at a time rather than batching, and keep the sent copies with the payroll records.
Which report rebuilds a paycheck?
When a stub is lost or a number is disputed, print the numbers instead of hunting for paper. The Payroll Transaction Detail report, under Reports, Employees and Payroll, filters to a single employee and a chosen date range. It lists wages, taxes withheld, deductions, employer contributions, and net pay, which is everything a stub carries, and expanded rows show each wage item behind the totals. The Payroll Summary report gives year to date totals for any year, which is often what a lender or a benefits office actually wants. Both print to PDF through the same converter.
Archive pay history for former employees
Former employees are the harder case. They cannot ask the portal for an old stub, and they never appear in day to day payroll, so nobody notices a gap until a loan application or a benefit claim needs proof of income. Build the archive before that happens. For each departed employee, run Payroll Transaction Detail filtered to their name across their full span of employment, print it to PDF, and store it with the year end backups. Keep everything for as long as your tax authority requires.
One warning from our repair desk: file cleanup can turn old transactions into journal summaries, and payroll detail does not survive that intact. Export the payroll records first, and if you plan on condensing an oversized QuickBooks company file, confirm what happens to payroll history before the job runs.
A discontinued payroll service changes who hands out the stubs, not whether the stubs exist. Your file holds every paycheck you ever recorded. Printing, emailing, and archiving them is a local job from here on.