Importing Payroll Deductions and Benefits in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Those of you who use the Microsoft Dynamics GP Human Resources Module in conjunction with payroll are aware of the requirement to make all changes to deductions and benefits in the HR module first and the data will be pushed to the Payroll module. The Benefits Data Flow Rule in Dynamics GP is as follows:

Benefits Data –> HR Module –> Payroll module.

Maintaining this one-way flow of data in the day-to-day course of business is not overly burdensome. However, when you have a large number employees participating in an open enrollment process and the employee benefit selections must be imported to Dynamics GP the task of maintaining the synchronization of the HR and payroll tables is not so easy.

Dynamics GP 2016 offers a Benefits Self-Service module that streamlines the open enrollment process with the automated transfer of information to human resources and payroll tables. There are also ISV products that facilitate the benefits open enrollment process and maintain the synchronization of the HR and payroll tables; GeeenShades and Integrity Data are two such ISVs. These integrated products are the best way to manage the volume and complexity of the benefits open enrollment process and maintain the synchronization of the HR and payroll benefits tables.

However, I have recently seen several HR departments elect to use third party benefit administrators with solutions that are not integrated with Dynamics GP. In this case, the benefit administrator collects the employee benefit selections data and provides a file that can be used as the source for an import using Integration Manager (IM) or SmartConnect. The problem is that these integration tools will only import benefit data into the payroll tables and this violates the Benefits Data Flow Rule specified above. This leaves the HR and payroll tables unsynchronized. So how do you backwards synchronize these tables?

It is true that Dynamic GP provides an HR reconciliation utility to force benefits enrollment data from Payroll to HR tables. However, there are limits to what this utility can do; it does not provide a fill synchronization. According to Microsoft,

“The reconcile is really only supposed to be run the first time… (during implementation). It does not know to update amounts, (dates)…, it just puts the records over there (in the HR tables).

So what do you have to do to fully backwards synchronize the HR benefits table and payroll benefits tables? The answer is not very satisfying. The basic steps are:

1. Import the benefits data to the payroll tables.
2. Run the HR employee enrollment reconcile utility to push benefit data (partial data) from the payroll benefits tables to the HR Benefits table.
3. Run SQL scripts to populate the missing data (amounts, dates, etc.) in the HR benefit table with data from the payroll benefits tables.

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by Dave Funk for RSM

Dave Funk