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Only at the journal level. The QuickBooks Online Accounting API exposes payroll as the summary wage, tax and deduction entries posted to your general ledger, not the payroll detail (individual paychecks, pay rates, hours, withholdings or net pay). Employee-level compensation lives behind a separate Payroll (Compensation and Time) API that is partner-gated and Beta, so standard third-party apps cannot self-enable it.
What it can do. Read and post payroll as journal-level activity, the summary wages, employer taxes and deduction totals in the general ledger and financial reports, through the standard QuickBooks Online Accounting API.
Where it stops. Return employee-level paycheck detail, pay rates, hours, withholdings or net pay through the Accounting API, because that data requires the separate, partner-gated and Beta Payroll (Compensation and Time) API.
Short version: the standard QuickBooks Online Accounting API (OAuth scope com.intuit.quickbooks.accounting) lets you read payroll only at the journal level, the summary wage, employer-tax and deduction lines that post to your general ledger. It does not return payroll detail such as individual paychecks, pay rates, hours, tax withholdings or net pay. Those runs land in QBO as Journal Entries and expense transactions, which the Accounting API can read and write, and which flow into reports like Profit and Loss and the General Ledger.
The Accounting API does expose an Employee entity, but it is a name-list record (display name, address, contact, employee number, hire and release dates, and an optional billable rate for time tracking). It is not a payroll object and carries no compensation, benefit or withholding data. Intuit keeps that data behind separate scopes: on the scopes catalog the general grouping offers only com.intuit.quickbooks.accounting and com.intuit.quickbooks.payment as non-restricted scopes, while qb.payroll.compensation.read and qb.payroll.benefits sit in a restricted, Beta-access tier.
Intuit does run a Payroll (Compensation and Time) API that returns employee compensation, time and deduction data, but it is not openly available. The payroll domain scope com.intuit.quickbooks.payroll is flagged for Intuit-authorized apps only, and the compensation scopes are Beta. In practice a general app that requests payroll scopes is rejected (reported: developers describe invalid-scope and 403 errors on the payroll workflow), and production access requires becoming an approved Intuit partner. Reported onboarding is heavy: partner review plus an annual security assessment, with some partners citing up to two months for production keys (see Intuit help, Is there a QuickBooks Online Payroll API? and Enrolling in QuickBooks Online Payroll API).
For most controllers the working answer is the payroll journal. Whether wages are run in QuickBooks Payroll or in an outside provider (ADP, Gusto and similar), the numbers arrive in QBO as a summary Journal Entry, and the Accounting API can create, read and update those entries. That keeps the ledger, financial statements and the close accurate, but it will not deliver employee-by-employee pay detail over the API.