Converting to Payroll 7

September is a month that I have always shared a love hate relationship with.  When I was a kid, it meant the end of summer vacation and thus began with a most somber feeling.  On the other hand, my birthday falls in September so by default this should be one of my favorite months. 

 In 2008, this particular September, something special is happening here as support for Payroll 6 draws to a close.  I know that right now many of us are thinking, its early July right now and there is really no reason why I should start thinking about this with September 30th being so far off.  Sorry fellow procrastinators, but this IS the time to start thinking about running the Payroll conversion.  Obviously, the best thing to do is run a test conversion on the data now and work forward from there.  I have included below my suggestions on steps to take right now to enjoy a smooth transition:

1. Start Today!  Make a backup of your live database, and load it on a standalone machine.  If you have any questions on how to do this, give us a call in Support, or just email me and I will get someone to contact you and help set this up.  Or, try the following solutions from our Knowledgebase: 
           How to make a backup (BB94455)
           How to install The Financial Edge (BB273248)

2. Once you have this standalone machine up and running with the copy of your database loaded, run through the Payroll conversion on this machine.  Let it complete so you can get a feel of how long the actual conversion process may take.

3. When that completes, print out the exception report.  As soon as the conversion is complete, there will be a link to click to view it.  If you accidentally closed it,dont worry - you can always browse to c:\ and look for the file pyconvert.log to get this information.

4. If you get any messages or errors on the conversion log that don't make sense, contact Support and we will be happy to walk you through what these errors or exceptions mean, and how we can address them in the converted Payroll 7 system, or how we can address them in your current Payroll 6 system (when possible) to remove those from the live conversion.

The key here is planning, planning, planning!  We want to be sure that we allow enough time to run a few test conversions.  This ensures that when the date comes to go live on Payroll 7, it can be as simple as letting the conversion run, and when complete users can login, get a few things setup and start getting out Payroll checks! 

Happy Payrolling.

Daniel