Deleting Unneeded Payroll Items

[judylind]

A former church treasurer added several dozen Payroll Items to the Payroll Items list, many duplicates except for the Item Number and others that simply are no longer needed. These are mixed among the 10 or 20 Payroll Items we actually use and are very confusing. I know I can change Item numbers and names, but nothing I do lets me delete those not needed. Error message is:

"Item number [whatever] is defined in the list of Employee Pay Items. You cannot delete an item that is defined as a pay item."

None of these unneeded items are assigned to any current or former (still on the books) employees. In fact data for former employees for whom the numbers must have been intended has all been deleted, along with the employees themselves.

We use Ver. 9 with the latest Maintenance Update, on Win 98SE & Millenium networked machines. Are we doomed to just renumber all these to 900 numbers and store them at the end of the list?

[Dish-Man]

I basically "started over" with PowerChurch Accounting in 2006, but opted to keep my COA and "delete old data" so that NO TRANSACTIONS remain in PowerChurch. However, I cannot delete expense accounts that we don't use, pay items in payroll, etc. because I get errors that the accounts are used in other modules. As I said before, there are NO TRANSACTIONS because I have deleted them all! I just hate to have accounts, payroll items, etc sitting around not being used if we are NEVER going to use them again. I'm seriously thinking about starting the whole thing over from scratch before we get too far into the year, but I hate to have to type all that data in again: vendors, pay items, COA, etc.

[Jeff]

Jay, the problem you are seeing is that you still have some accounts setup in Pr Item Descriptions. Deleting old data n FA and PR doesn't delete the payroll item setup. There is an additional check when deleting an account from the chart of accounts that looks at the payroll setup. The reason for this is payroll posts diferently than the other modules. As soon as you print the the payroll check an entry is posted to FA. Other modules like AP won't let you post an entry to FA until all the accounts validate. We make this check because correcting this sitation after check printing in PR would be difficult.

What you need to do is go to Accounting -> Payroll -> Maintain Item Descriptions. Change or delete the items here that are using the accounts you want to delete. After doing this you can delete the accounts from the chart of accounts.

[Jeff]

Judy, you need to double check that all old data for those items has been deleted. Run the selected payroll data report and blank out both the from and to dates. (An easy way to blank out dates is to press Ctrl+Y when your cursor is in those fields) run the report for just the items you want to delete. You will probably find misdated transaction that are keeping the items from being deleted. Go back to delete old data in PR and make sure the date range includes these dates. You should then be able to delete those items.

[Dish-Man]

jeff, what I have tried to do is to DELETE a payroll item from the Maintain Payroll Item menu, but when I try to PowerChurch tells me "posted data exists for item 54 (or whatever). You cannot delete an item for which posted data exists."

As stated before, there is NO posted data because when I started the year, I deleted EVERY Transaction by "delete old data" and verified that NO posted transactions existed.

Why can't I delete these? they subsequently reference accounts that I can't delete either.

[Jeff]

I am sorry it looked like you were trying to delete accounts in maintain chart of accounts. Please double check as I explained to Judy. There is probably an entry stuck out there that you are not seeing. It might possibly have a future date as well. Blanking out both the from and to dates in the report selection will show any items regardless of date. You can limit it to your item 54.

[Dish-Man]

oops! I guess I missed that you have to delete old data in Payroll, Accounts payable, etc! That did it!! wondered why I got "stuff" hanging around that I couldn't get rid of!!

one last question. I have a payroll item that I cannot find in any employee pay item, however, when I try to delete it, it tells me that it's in one of the employee pay items. I did find one occurance, deleted it, re-indexed, exited PC and it stills says it's there. Any suggestions?

[Dish-Man]

found it! in a place it was NOT supposed to be!