About archiving and closing the payroll

At the end of the calendar year, use the Archive Payroll Data tab in the Database Administration tool to archive and close the payroll to prepare for the new calendar year. During the archiving process, Sage 100 Contractor removes all payroll records and resets the quarter-to-date and year-to-date totals to $0. You can also delete old or unnecessary employee records.

Note: Closing payroll does not affect the accrued vacation, sick, and compensation times in the employee records that you choose to retain.

Before entering timecards for the new calendar year, audit, back up, and then archive the payroll. Although you may back up your company data at any time, when archiving the payroll, it is sensible to back up your data after you have audited it and corrected any errors.

Archiving payroll can be time consuming, and the time necessary to create an archive may be considerable depending on the number of payroll records and employees contained in each company. We recommend creating a schedule of tasks to perform before archiving and closing payroll. For example, consider auditing the payroll a month before the scheduled closing date to provide enough time to resolve any errors.

While it is not recommended, Sage 100 Contractor lets you archive payroll with uncomputed records, unposted records, even payroll audit errors. If you close with unfinished work, you must go back to the archive later to compute and post the records, repair the audit errors, and adjust the payroll records in the active company. From the archive, you can also prepare and print the state and federal reports (including W-2 forms).

After you archive payroll, payroll numbers continue in sequence, rather than starting from 1, so that payroll record numbers are unique for a company, even across years.

Note: When you archive a payroll year, Sage 100 Contractorcreates new ACA records for the new payroll year. It uses the December values from the previous year as defaults for each month of the new year.