Ideas Portal
A backup facility as we had in paye-master is in my mind essential.
I see that this has been raised before and flagged as 'will not be implemented' but let me try and explain why it is essential.
For example: we have recently transferred our data across from paye-master.
Then we have spent quite a while re-organising all our pay elements.
At this point in paye-master I would take a back up so I can restore to this point if needed.
But as things stand, if anything doesn't go to plan in our November pay run on staffology we have no choice but to migrate the data over again and re-organise all our pay elements again.
This really is unacceptable.
There have been many situations in the past where we have needed to restore to a point part the way through a month's run.
Please re-consider making this option available.
Hey, thanks for reaching out and sharing the importance of a backup facility in Staffology. We appreciate the time you’ve taken to explain your use case, and we understand how critical it is for you to have confidence in your payroll processes, especially during onboarding.
There are differences between modern, cloud-based architecture, and self-hosted desktop software that present significant differences in how data is managed. Unlike systems like PAYE-Master, where each customer hosts their own data, the cloud environment that Staffology utilises operates within a shared database infrastructure. This design ensures better scalability, performance and reliability, but also means that creating isolated backups in the traditional sense isn’t feasible in the same way.
That’s not to say back-ups in a cloud environment aren’t possible; it's just significant more complex to implement mid-Pay Run backups in the cloud architecture. Instead of simply backing up a database and restoring at will, it would require complex versioning of Pay Runs and storing those multiple versions. For that reason, this functionality isn’t on our current roadmap. We’ll keep this idea open though so others can vote for it, and we’ll keep an eye on it.
We can also provide an alternative approach that we’ve observed other users take:
Step 1: When you would usually perform a backup in PAYE Master, in Staffology export the Pay Analysis Report with Employee Breakdown. This is a snapshot of the current pay run, with columns dynamically created for each Pay Code used.
Step 2: If you then needed to restore the payroll back to that point later, you could restart the Pay Run for all employees. This will clear all variable changes you have made so far in the Pay Run.
Step 3: Dependent on the size of the Pay Run, you can use the saved report from Step 1 to restore the Pay Run, either manually or by import. For a small Pay Run with a few employees, it'd be as quick to just make the changes manually; But for larger pay runs, the Staffology Pay Import allows you to map a custom format, so you should be able to import that data for all variable payments that were cleared down when the Pay Run was restarted.
That wouldn’t undo/revert any permanent employee changes that had been made, but it would be a route to restoring a Pay Run back to have all the same variable elements of pay. This is admittedly more work than restoring a backup, but I thought I’d share as it could still provide the safeguard in the (hopefully) rare instances you needed to restore a Pay Run.
Kind regards,
Alex