Processing ARL Payroll offline

[Helen_01]

HI Team

Due to the instability online and the poor qaulity of ARL payroll, I am going offline to process payroll.

It seems to be able to send payslips offline too, however an employee has just told me his entitlements are wrong this week. ( we did a 6 month audit just before processing).

Should I synch back online and then send payslips?

Better still can someone PM me. I would like to go back to Premier and just send the journal entries accross with monthly STP reports. When I used to do MYOB Exonet this is what we did, it was just the timesheets module and it worked beautifully.

You might have guessed that I am desperate here, payroll is now taking twice as long as it used to. I just cannot do this anymore, too many errors with our complex awards.

[Tracey_H]

Hi @Helen_01 

Sorry to hear you are having problems with processing payroll.  To clarify emailing from AccountRight, your file only needs to be online if you are emailing directly from the software, ie, not using an email software such as Outlook. If your file is offline you can still send emails but you will need Outlook.

This help article, Set up AccountRight to send emails, explains how emailing directly from the software works.

With regard to the incorrect entitlements, the payslip is a copy of what was recorded when the pay was processed. Generally speaking, emailing the payslip won't change the entitlements so I would recommend checking the pay transaction and entitlement reports. 

When you check out your company file (work offline) the online file is synced with a file on your computer so that you are working on an exact copy of the online file.  You may also find this help article, Synchronise your company file, informative.

Please let me know if you need further help.

[Helen_01]

Hi Tracey

thanks for confirming that using Outlook offline still sending payslips, I had checked with staff and this part went well.

However, before I went offline, the MYOB online was extremely unstable - shutting down frequently in the middle of entries and also sometimes 5 - 10 seconds between keystrokes. I finished payroll and then went offline.

Futher investigation last night revealed that I had lost the payroll run, all that the remained was the timesheets, aba file in the bank, the emailed payslips (payslips missing annual leave and TOIL for the 18.12.2019) and the ATO STP records successully sent. I did 3 entitlement reports during the day. The first one at 1.46 pm shows the leave accrued on the 18.12.2019, the second one at 4.30 pm has no entries for the 18.12.2019, and the third one done the day after (after backup and shutdown) show the 18.12.2019 once after I reprocessed it.

I had to go back and process payroll again so that the entitlements would balance. I'm not so concerned about STP as the double-up self-corrects next week. Thankfully, the aba files processed through the bank correctly the first time.

Timesheets are interesting - sometimes ARL does not allow zero hour line entries, other times its not an issue before accepting.

Since Sept, I regularly lose packets of data esp. LSL, personal leave and TOIL. I notice a past post from Hayden in MYOB community on this point. Payroll now takes 3 times as long. I have had this issue confirmed by my accountant and other users as well.

In addition, the auto sych does not work every 20 minutes, but today its about 3 hours apart, which is not too bad.

I also have temporarily lost supplier amounts paid when processing online (keystroke delays and errors/close-downs whilst on-line again). After closing down and backing up, they seem to reappear a day or 2 later.

The backchecking has turned this into a job taking 2 - 4 hours to 6 - 7. Lets hope the online fragility does not continue.

To look into this further I have checked that MYOB is approved via firewall, I have checked our NBN upload,  download and ping as well as running latency tests. They are all stable.

[Helen_01]

HI Tracey

With the greatest respect I think you are dancing around the problem. The entitlements went backwards. Things that had been previously recorded disappeared. It has shaken our confidence.

You say that you can work offline, and I did yesterday, but of course in the online file the payslips were recorded as unsent. Its possible, but messy. I have to go online for your bank feeds as that's the main product for your online ARL. But, long backups and internet connection fails bring this down to a wireless product standard.

As a software company we run other cloud products, which show much greater integrity after connection disruptions. At the moment, the is the most unstable product we have. Please keep developing your API product to recover lost packet disruptions. I ran MYOB remote wireless back 10 years ago, and this feels exactly the same.

[Helen_01 · Accepted solution]

Hi Tracey

I have read through all those articels, thank-you. It is good to be reminded.

The best bit of advice I picked up was the build up of temporary files.

When I did wireless MYOB previously 10 years ago, I backed up after 4 hours, closed down, adn then started up again. It is extremely time consuming, but it sure beats loosing data data. 

I spend alot of time now waiting for things to download, it is frustrating not to be more productive, it has cost us another 0.5 staff in admin.

[Tracey_H]

Hi @Helen_01 

Generally speaking, entitlement and other information in the company file is current at the time of viewing. For example, if you produce an entitlement report for an employee that will show the current entitlements listed in the company file.

If you are encountering reporting errors or unusual values appearing we would first recommend clearing your cache: AccountRight Cache clearing.

In your case you have moved the company file locally, it brings the sync file into play.. So another recommendation would be to ensure the file is stored online, move the current sync file to another location before resyncing that file. Help Article:  Manual synchronisation - What can I do if I’m getting an error when manually synchronising? would outline that process.

Please let me know if you need further help.