Rewinding a Pay Run

Rewinding a pay run restores the state of a Company and its Employees to the point just before it was approved, to allow corrections to be made.

By its nature, a rewind is a destructive operation, and of course, there are some things that simply cannot be undone such as any impact the approved run had on external systems (e.g. previous bank payments, tax and pension submissions). Therefore, paiyroll® provides simpler alternatives for most cases, see Handling errors.

The rest of this section provides further information on rewind.

What does rewind do?

The rewind will:

  • Restore Company and Employee state.

  • Restore the Pay Item inputs from the pay run. This undoes any changes made since the pay run. If new pay items have been added to workers, these will be removed.

  • Unmark Sickness, Holiday and Timesheet Approvals as processed. Additional steps may be needed to adjust the Approvals as needed. For example, a Timesheet might need to be created and approved.

  • Restore the Pay Schedule for the pay run concerned to allow it to be restarted. The actual restart will need to be done manually after all changes are made.

  • Produce documentation logging the changes.

The rewind will not:

  • Restore any changes in Pay Definitions. Checks will be made before the rewind is performed to prevent errors:

    • Pay Definitions which you have deleted will need to be recreated.

    • Pay Definition changes which you made will need to be undone.

    • Pay Definition changes made as paiyroll® develops may require assistance. Contact paiyroll® support for help.

  • Restore any changes in Report Definitions.

How do I perform a rewind?

When it is needed, a rewind is performed from the Pay Runs screen by clicking Rewind…. The rewind can be performed either as a dry-run, or as a “live” run.

A dry-run simulates the effect of a “live” run, but makes no actual changes. However, it does produce a detailed log of what a live run would do. The first and last parts of the log provide summary information (and the centre contains verbose details) which can be used to review the proposed change.

Once the results of a dry-run have been reviewed, the live and destructive rewind can be performed.

Warning

You will need to address the impact on external systems (e.g. previous bank payments, tax and pension submissions).

  1. The paiyroll® system allows a Company to run multiple Pay Schedules, for example a pair of monthly and weekly schedules might be in use. Typically, there will be an in-progress interim pay run in progress for each schedule. These must be deleted; convenient links are provided.

  2. Before performing the rewind, it is recommended to download a copy of the snapshot for the pay run to be rewound. Simply View it and then click View Snapshot and save the results.

  3. Perform the rewind.

  4. You should now be able to make the necessary changes.

  5. Manually start the pay run using Pay run workflows. In the case of a Custom run or On-demand pay run, the list of workers will need to be provided as needed.

  6. Review the results of the interim pay run carefully. Since this pay run has not yet been approved, further changes can be made simply using Redo as needed.