Payroll update for Dynamics GP

The past couple of days have been interesting regarding payroll updates. We have a couple of clients that run an extremely large amount of payroll transactions (I.E. One client paid around 30,000 employees last year). Typically when a tax update is released you:

• Have the client check for tax updates on their own
• Have them run the update automatically or manually
• Wait a second or two then go your merry way feeling happy you remembered to remind clients there was a tax update release

Well when you are dealing with such a large amount of transactions we felt it prudent to do some testing before giving the All OK sign. Here is the process we initiated:

1. Have all Dynamics users get out of the system
2. Backup Dynamics and company databases. Tax updates will effect the system/Dynamics tables so make sure that database is backed up
3. Enter payroll transactions in a batch. Make sure transactions cover a variety of situations (I.E. Multiple states, dependants, withholdings, deductions, benefits, etc.)
4. Build batch and run process through until you get calculation report. Save report, print it out, etc.
5. Remove batch from build
6. Install tax update. Can do automatically or manually. See MBS payroll site
7. Build batch again as in Step 2 and run until you get calculation report
8. Verify tax amounts have changed from Step 2
9. Verify tax amounts are correct. We did the below calculations to verify the numbers were as they should be. These numbers matched the calculation report in Step 6
10. We then had the client verify these numbers were correct as well
11. Remove build and delete transaction batch used in Step 2 and step 6
12. Signed off on payroll tax update

We started this process on one of the clients test server but after it took 4 hours to restore the backup and after opening Dynamics we still received several errors on the test system we decided the test server was really just there to waste electricity. We ended up doing this on the production server.

Disadvantage on testing on production server

• All users had to be out of the system for a couple of hours

Advantages

• The production server was much faster
• After the tax update was installed and tested we didn’t have to reapply tax update as we would have if we did this first on the test server.

So you probably think I’m a fairly big chicken when it comes to trusting MBS on SP’s and tax updates. It may have cost the client a few hours of testing and time but when payroll is involved I’d rather be called names than be totally naive.