Curious what others do to test BSI Cyclical upgrades. Would anyone be willing to share their test plan please. I sometimes feel like we are over doing our testing. Thank you!
Hi Deanna, we have the data refreshed in our test environment. Then we run a PR140 for a processing group that has lots of locals, and a processing group that covers our professional employees, who have "interesting" taxes, and save the reports. Then we install the cyclical in the test environment, rerun the PR140s for those groups, and make sure all the totals match to the first set.
So you don't worry about putting in new hires, PR13 changes, Personnel Actions, etc that affect taxes?
Also curious about how you run your PR140's for testing - do you 1) close out the cycle after your "PR140 before upgrade" and start a new cycle...or 2) do you run your "PR140 before upgrade" and do the BSI cyclical upgrade in the middle of an open payroll cycle & rerun the PR140 after the upgrade? Wasn't sure if you could successfully do a BSI cyclical upgrade in the middle of an open payroll cycle without causing issues in Lawson. When we do tax bulletins and cyclical upgrades we always make sure payroll cycles are closed - maybe we have been doing this and dont really need to?
Hi Deanna, we don't use personnel actions, and we don't enter new employees or PR13 changes as part of testing. But I don't think it is necessarily a bad idea to add a new employee in the test env, or make some PR13 changes there, to confirm everything is working as expected!
We refresh our test system with production data at a point when there are plenty of time records in production, but PR140 has not run in Update yet. Our professional employees are salaried and only paid once per month, so we will usually create time records for them in the test system from a group standard time record. Then we run PR140s in the test system in Report Only at least for processing groups that will give BSI a good work out. If there is time and/or it looks like the cyclic does a lot of changes that affect us, my payroll support person tells me that he will run PR140s for the entire company. After this is done, we save the reports and have our system admin apply the cyclic to our test BSI server. Then we run the same PR140s again and compare the before/after reports. We check all the differences between the 2 sets of reports.
We do a much smaller version of the before/after test when the cyclic is applied to the production BSI server.
Our process is very similar to pbelsky. We make sure our TEST system has fairly recent data, upload the time records from one of our large biweekly payroll cycles using PR530, run the preliminary payroll cycle jobs up through LP140, have Networking install the BSI cyclical and latest tax bulletins, place a few time records in error status, re-run the payroll cycle up through LP140 and compare the PR140 company totals to ensure Gross, Net, Taxable Wages, Taxable Withholding hasn’t changed. If data has changed, we confirm that based on the BSI updates, the changes were accurate. We don’t typically have time to make PR13 or personnel action changes, but it definitely would be helpful. You would want to process those changes after you did your PR140 before (run #1) and PR140 after (run #2) comparison, so these additional changes would require a 3rd re-run of the payroll cycle. Otherwise, your company totals aren’t going to match and it just takes more time to reconcile the differences. Of course, you would use different job names each time you run the cycle or save all of the reports to another location, so the reports don’t get overwritten.
Thank you for your input! This has been very helpful!
