These options appear on the File menu and provide various housekeeping or data management tasks.
Select company
This option shows you all the payroll company files in PayTek. You select the file to work on with this menu and access the new company wizard to create new files.
Normally you will have your current year file on this list with all the previous years files that can be opened if necessary for review etc.
Double click the file to open it or highlight it and click Open.
The Rebuild option will recreate the company list. This rebuilds the list only and does not affect the company data files at all.
The Delete option will send a company file to the Recycle bin. If you have to recover a file from the recycle bin you will then need to run the rebuild option.
Backup Data Files
It is essential that you take regular, secure backups of your data files to protect the data. (Consider the time investment in re-entering a whole year’s data if the file is lost.)
You must protect your data from
- hard disk failure (always backup to a different drive)
- data corruption (backup regularly and keep multiple sets) and
- fire or theft (backup to an external drive, USB stick, CD or zip disk and store a copy at home).
We recommend that you backup the data files just before finalising each payrun so that should an error be discovered you can restore from backup, correct the error and re-finalise the payrun.
PayTek compresses the backup into one small file so you can easily keep a backup of each payrun through the year.
At year-end you should take 2 permanent backups of your data files, label them appropriately and file them safely. When you create the ATO file to send the payment summary information you should make a backup copy of the file as well.
You can backup to any location so you may wish to backup to a different hard drive (say a server drive).
Remember that the backup option only takes a copy of the current active file. That is, it does NOT backup all the company files.
If you wish to burn a CD with your PayTek files just copy the entire PayTek folder. This will include all the company files that sit in folders under the program folder.
A good idea is to backup to a cloud location like Google Drive or Dropbox.
Restore Data Files
Should you ever want to restore a payroll backup, it is recommended that you create a new company file with the backup rather that overwriting the existing data. This guards against restoring from a corrupt disk and losing the current information as well.
Restore the file into a new company file using the new company wizard and when successful, delete the previous copy of the data if necessary.
Export data
PayTek Transfer file
This option allows you to create a transfer file of the PayTek data that can be sent to your accountant via email or to ADE support. It copies all the data except for the payslip layout files.
Export to spreadsheet
You can create a spreadsheet file containing masterfile or transaction information from your payroll. This may be useful for printing mailing labels or analysing payroll data. You can specify a date range for transactions.
Import Data
PayTek Transfer file
This option loads a PayTek company file from a transfer file created with the export data option. This is similar to restoring from backup (all existing data in the active company file will be overwritten.
Timeclock date import
This option allows you to import timeclock files into PayTek. This will load the data into the current payrun. The file is in CSV format and must adhere to the following layout.
PAYDATE,EMPCODE,PAYITEM,HOURS,DETAILS
23/10/2008,SMITH,ORD,33,Normal time for projects
23/10/2008,SMITH,ORD15
23/10/2008,SMITH,CAR,234.56
…
NOTE: If the pay item is a fixed amount (ie as the CAR allowance pay item is in the sample data) the hours will be imported as a dollar amount.
When importing you can ignore any zero amount records and also choose to add the imported transactions to the current payrun or to replace the current pay transactions.
The file is validated before it is imported to allow you to correct it if necessary.
Validate data files
This option will rebuild the data file indexes and validate the integrity of the data files.