Is it necessary to do a year end closing?

[danas253]

Is it really necessary to close the year out after you have printed your W-2's, 940.941's? I don't like that once I do this my data is no longer available from the previous year unless I do a restore. I was wondering what the purpose of this is?

[Paul Mayer]

The purpose is file size. With newer technology where we don't even see the old 3.5 inch A: drives on computers, fewer people are using the for backup. So it really is not necessary any longer.

But, to keep things clean, I use the Windows File Explorer and make a copy of my database at the end of the year and append the year to it. As an example:

ZPAY Payroll Systems Inc-2009.dxi

Then I run the end of year tool. So why did I say it's not necessary above but I still do it?

Because the End of Year tool removes employees I've marked as Unemployed. Much cleaner with them gone. It also deletes all of the payroll transactions. Much easier pinpointing a specific payroll if I made a mistake and need to find, delete and do over.

And of course, if I need to look at a past year, they are all in my data folder each with the year appended to the filename letting me know which is which. Then I simply click File and Open Company and I'm in business.