Payroll - Is it Still Working Correctly? Important Tests To Ensure a Successful Kronos Upgrade

The third in a series of articles by guest author Chris Flanders

The second major area of testing is payroll. It is vital to retotalize your previous pay period.

Confirm that your configuration still works exactly the same way it has been. This will give you the confidence that, if nothing else changes, your employees in & out punches will get totalized in the same way and the employee will get paid the same way.

You can do this test by going through the following steps:

1. Take a backup of your production database and upgrade it in a test environment to the new version.

2. Remove signoff on all employees in the previous pay period.

3. Force all employees to be retotalized by the BGP. (Run the SQL command "update total events set totalization status = 2".)

4. Signoff on the previous pay period for all the employees.

5. Run your payroll extract against the test system. (NOTE: To do this, you must have already upgraded and tested your interfaces. This process will help you confirm that your payroll extract interface is working correctly.)

6. Compare your new test extract to the real production extract that you had before you took your production database backup.

This final step lets you see & confirm that all the time records that you extract from your existing system are identical to ones that have been totalized by and extracted from the upgraded test system. For any exceptions between the two (and there will probably be some), you just research and figure out why it was there. In most cases, it will just be some quirk of the extract timing, but what you want to find out is if anything in your rules configuration is now calculating differently. THAT is the key output of this test and successful completion of this test should give you (and your executive mgmt) a high level of confidence that when you upgrade, payroll won't suddenly change and you won't start paying out tons of OT!

There is a secondary benefit to this test as well. In order to complete it successfully, it means that you will also have been able to successfully:

-upgrade your database
-get an app server working
-get a BGP working and totalizing
-log into the application and do group edits
-run your extract interface