Use cases
Every payroll test below has the same job: put the output of two systems, or two configurations, side by side and find the differences before go-live. Pick the situation closest to yours.
Each page covers what to load, what the comparison shows and where its limits are for that kind of project.
Test payroll consolidation after an M&A by comparing each acquired entity’s legacy payroll with the target system, employee by employee.
Read moreTest a payroll upgrade, cloud move or new vendor by comparing old and new pay results by employee and pay code, and keep every run in the project’s history.
Read moreTest tax, union agreement and benefit changes by comparing payroll before and after the change, with thresholds and recorded reviewer decisions.
Read moreWhatever triggered the test, the work in SmartCompaire is the same. You create a project, map source employee numbers to target employee numbers, map source pay codes to target pay codes, and load pay data from both sides as spreadsheet or CSV exports.
A comparison run then totals amounts per employee and mapped pay code on each side and records the difference. Rows found on only one side are kept as results, so a pay code missing from the target system shows up instead of disappearing.
Each difference is graded against the absolute threshold you set for its bucket and code type (how you group pay codes, such as Earnings and Gross), and labelled by your status rules. A row with no threshold for its bucket and code type is not graded, and a row without an employee or pay code mapping is labelled No employee mapping or No paycode mapping instead. Every run is kept in the project history, so you can fix a mapping, run again and compare the over-threshold count across runs.
SmartCompaire finds, grades and records differences. It does not change either payroll system. A few things matter when you plan a test:
A project can be set to the time comparison type. Time projects use the same file layout and comparison logic as payroll, with hours or units in the Number column. Number differences are recorded, and grading against thresholds applies to the Amount column.
If your time export has hours but no amounts, every row will grade as matched. Review the Number difference column or filter on it, because status and threshold results reflect Amount only.
SmartCompaire can test any payroll system that exports pay results to a spreadsheet or CSV file. It reads the first worksheet of .xlsx, .xls or .csv uploads against a 15-column pay data template. It does not connect to payroll systems directly.
Yes, if you can export results from both configurations. Load the current output as the source and the changed output as the target. You still map each employee number and each pay code to itself; for employees, a two-column file upload is enough. The run then shows every mapped employee and pay code whose amount changed. SmartCompaire does not know the rule itself; it shows the effect on the amounts.
No. SmartCompaire finds, grades and records differences, and lets your team link them to defects or to known or acceptable difference (KD/AD) records. Corrections are made in the payroll system. An admin then replaces or clears that side's pay data, loads the corrected export and runs again, because a normal import adds to the existing data and does not replace it. If a mapping was the problem, fix the mapping and run again; there is no need to reload pay data.
Bring a source and a target extract from your parallel run; we will walk through the comparison with you.
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