Importing a payroll file into Reckon

Rosie have you looked at the import format for iif files? Have a look at the help system in particular the format TIMEACT. You need to talk to Steve Batten at Zed Axis. This is exactly what he does. It's extremely disappointing your payroll services provider isn't prepared to help with this. What sort of requirements analysis was done prior to choosing this software? I disagree with you about Reckon's support for add ons. There's dozens of them. If you looked at the add ons store you would see this. This is the record layout:

DATE

The date the activity was performed. Enter the date in a MM/DD/YY format. For example, you would enter June 21, 1997 as 06/21/97.

JOB

The name of the customer (or job) for whom the activity was performed. If you're entering the name of a job, enter the customer's name followed by a colon followed by the name of the job. Both the customer and the job names must also be on your Customers & Jobs list (CUST).

EMP

The name of the employee who performed the activity. The employee's name must also be on your Employee list (EMP).

ITEM

The name of the service item assigned to the activity (a service item indicates the type of work performed). The service item must also be on your Item list (INVITEM).

PITEM

Leave blank. This field is not used in Reckon Accounts.

DURATION

The duration of the activity in hours and minutes. Enter the duration in an HH:MM format. For example, if the activity lasted 4 hours and 15 minutes, you would enter 4:15. The duration cannot be greater than 23:59.

PROJ

The Reckon Accounts class assigned to the activity (classes give you a way to group activities in meaningful ways in time reports). The Class must also be on your Class list (CLASS).

NOTE

Your notes about the activity. You may enter up to 1000 characters, but the characters must be on a single line within the field. To indicate a line break in the note, type /n.

BILLINGSTATUS

Indicates the billing status of the activity. Enter one of these values:

 

0

The activity is not billable to the customer or job specified in the Job field. Enter this value if the activity is part of your company overhead.

 

1

The activity is billable but has not yet been billed to the customer or job specified in the Job field.

 

2

The activity has already been billed to the customer or job specified in the Job field.

If you want to send me the iif files, I will test them on my system to see if I can isolate the error. Call me any time 04 07744914

Hi Kevin, Thanks so much for your reply. We looked for a software company that could record time and attendance, interpret the award and import into Reckon. They hadn't completed the import into Reckon before so its new to them, maybe that should have been an indication of possible issues. 

I will have a look at the import file and check it against the information you put above. 

Would Utilities - Import - IIF files be the correct way to import a payroll file?

I haven't looked into add-ons as I was told I could just import straight in, I will jump online now and have a look at what these add-ons entail. Thanks :)

Rosie I would never have signed up with the provider if you needed to integrate the two systems without proof of concept. Yes, that's exactly what you would do to import the activities file. I have done this on numerous occasions using different time recording systems. I would go back to whoever told you that you could import the information straight in and get them to fix this.

In hindsight I agree. Unfortunately we are stuck now. I will go back to them today and request they fix the issue. 
Thanks for your advice. 

Hi Kevin, I have made a lot of progress with the payroll company today. Turns out I just needed to call someone a little higher and he worked wonders with the export. One question we both have is whether you can import entitlement balances? Staff accrue TIL here and we set up the payroll system to record negative balances for this so that it would increase the entitlement when brought into Reckon but it doesn't seem to like this when importing. Do you know if we are able to do this or if we will need to enter TIL manually? 

Thanks in advance, Rosie 

What leave type are you using for til?

Its an hourly leave type. Time In Lieu is also set up as the "Other Leave Type 1"

Kevin,
My small business is growing quickly and what was an easy payroll a couple of years ago is now quite difficult. I am using Reckon Accounts R4 and I am struggling with many aspects of the payroll to the point where I am looking at other products, but this is my busy time and I cannot change over until things quieten down and in any case I cannot believe that Reckon could not solve some of these issues.
These are my challenges.......
1) I pay 160 people per week and they work in crews of 20 in diverse locations. I want to be able to print payslips for one crew and then email that file off to the local supervisor. Instead I have to print 160 payslips in alpha order by surname, then save the file under the name of one group then go through and delete all but the 20 workers in that group. Then start again with the original file and save it for the second group of 20 etc. etc. It takes many hours to do this each week. The payroll seems very primitive in that regard. I would like to have several other options besides date range to use to select a small subset of workers to print payslips for, like location, state, or some other filter that I have created.
Right now my work around is to give each employee's surname a prefix (like A-Smith; A-Jones) so they will sort in the order I want. I will still have to do the save and delete exercise with the PDF file but at least they will be in order. Any suggestions? I have read about "class" but I cannot see how that can help as it does not show up as a filter option in the print dialogue box.
2) As I have tried to find a solution to this problem I saw mention of 'premium payroll'. Is that what I have or is there another better payroll product that has these features I need?
3) To print a particular set of payslips or a particular 'payroll totals report' I find that putting in the dates of the week of payment does not retrieve the correct data. Instead I have to put in the payment date. This seems crazy since if I want to print payslips from a year ago I wont know which day I paid on but I do know which pay period I want to look at. There must be something wrong with my system.
4) I get about 70 time sheets per week, each with 20 workers on it. I use a database to boil all this down into a manageable form, but then I have to hand key 160 lines of data into the payroll. My workers do many different jobs in a week and are paid piece rate, so there may be 10-20 different payments that have to be recorded for each worker. I would like to explore this idea of using the IFF file to upload my data.

Would you be available to provide support to my business on these matters? It is too risky for me to make any changes myself as I cannot afford for my payroll to go down. It currently takes about 15 hours a week to do my payroll and it should only take a couple of hours if the problems mentioned above were solved. Thanks......... Grant

Grant mate, call me 0407744914