Chris21 end of year is a critical time for your payroll department. This is where a number of processes are run to ensure the Chris21 database is prepared for the new financial year. It’s the time when employee payment summaries are prepared and the payroll year is closed off and the new one begins.
If you are familiar with the Chris21 end of year process you will be aware that a number of backups are made of your database prior to running certain critical processes. For instance, one of the final processes is Clear End of Year (CLR) which resets employee year to date figures. This process is irreversible without a backup, it therefore follows that a backup must always be taken before this is done.
As I have mentioned, your final end of year backup is critical in the event that you need to restore data due to an unforeseen error in your end of year processing. But it can also serve another very useful purpose, that is to provide a Chris21 end of year database.
The main benefit of having an end of year database is that Payroll will be able to run reports over the previous year’s data if need be. Bear in mind that once the end of year clear is complete and the new financial year has begun, there will be a lot of information that will no longer be readily available in your live version of Chris21. But you can access this information if you have created an end of year database. I touch on this topic in my blog How to Manage Your Chris21 Environments.
You will need to ask your IT department to create a new Chris21 environment and then copy the end of year backup of your DAT directory to this environment. The DAT directory is the name given to the folder that holds all of your Chris21 data files.
Once this Chris21 end of year database has been created, you will be able to login just as you would in your live system and run reports over the previous financial year’s data.
An added benefit of having an end of year database is that you will be able to access information that may have since been archived from your live system. If you do regularly archive your database, you may be able to find the information you want by looking in your end of year database. This will save you the trouble of asking IT to restore your archived data.
As a payroll professional, having an easily accessible Chris21 end of year database can certainly be of great benefit to you. I think it makes sense to add this to your end of year procedures, especially since you will already have a fresh backup of your database prior to closing off your end of year processing.