Alowa

I installed monero on my win10 box and ran monero which synced in a few hours. I have a local wallet and use Wolf's GPU miner to mine using -o daemon:tcp://URL -u monero address

Mining starts but just some questions before I'm going to watch this for a month:

Do I need the -p switch to set the password or is that mainly intended when mining for an online Pool? Is there any way to check what the progress is an if a payout is expected?