Accessing Payroll Years 2010 and Older

With the new database system for Payroll 8.2, not a week goes by without a panicked customer calling us and declaring, “All my old payroll years are gone!” They probably feel like this. But don’t worry- all your old years are still there and I’ll explain how to access them.

First off, with the database system, the program will create an entirely new icon for each payroll year. You should have noticed this year that when you went to New Year 2012 that a 2012 icon was placed on your desktop. Why did we do that? In the old program when you went to new year, you lost the ability to access old forms and use old tax rates from prior years. I don’t know about you, but I do make mistakes time to time. Having access to old forms and old payroll with the CORRECT tax rates from that time can save you a major headache if you find out you made a mistake for past payroll or tax forms. However, we only had you convert 2011 to this format and you have started and will continue to build years in this format with 2012, 2013, etc.

Okay, okay. So how do you access old years? Here’s from Support:

Upgrading and converting 2011 and/or 2012 data does not delete the 2010 and older payroll years’ data from the local disc drive C (Windows), the Mac HD (Macintosh), or any applicable server. 

In order to view those years, make a note of the path where the older version of the program/application is located and navigate to it each time you need to research an old year. The following paths are the recommended directories where the old program/application was initially installed. If the location has been changed the following paths will not be applicable. For Windows PCs, the path is local disc drive C:/program files/payroll where the pay.exe icon can be found and clicked to open the older version. For Macs, the path is Mac HD/applications/payroll 8.1f, where the CheckMark Payroll icon can be clicked to open the older application. Once the program/application opens, click on open company and navigate to where the files from the prior year(s) are stored. If the company cannot be located, use the find company option under the file menu to locate the payroll files from prior years. 

For full access to the KnowledgeBase article click here.