Data Migration & Going Live

Choose the cut-over

The cleanest cut-over is 1 March, the start of the South African tax year: no year-to-date balances to carry, and one clean IRP5 per employee. Mid-year is entirely possible — it just requires accurate year-to-date figures.

Decide what to bring

• Always — employee master data, current salaries, banking, leave balances.
• Mid-year — year-to-date earnings, deductions, PAYE, UIF, SDL and ETI per employee.
• Optional — historical payslips (often kept in the old system as a read-only archive instead).

Build the plan

1. Export from the old system
2. Map fields to the Payroll Africa import templates
3. Import employees and validate
4. Import year-to-date balances and reconcile to the last EMP201
5. Run a parallel payroll
6. Investigate every difference
7. Go live and decommission

Step 1 — Employees

Upload your employee export. The Migration Hub includes mappings for common systems, so columns from a Sage, SimplePay or Crest export are recognised automatically. Unmapped columns are shown for manual mapping.

Step 2 — Year-to-date balances

Upload the per-employee YTD file: gross, taxable, PAYE, UIF employee and employer, SDL, ETI claimed and retirement contributions. Reconcile the totals to your last submitted EMP201 before continuing — this is the single most important check in the whole migration.

Step 3 — History (optional)

Upload prior period summaries where you need in-system history for reporting.

Validation

Every step validates before writing. Errors reference the row and column so corrections are quick.

The parallel run

Process one period in both systems and compare per employee: gross, each deduction, PAYE, UIF, SDL, ETI and net pay.

Explaining differences

Small PAYE differences usually come from a different annualisation treatment of once-off payments, different medical credit counts, or a fringe benefit valued differently. Investigate every difference rather than accepting a tolerance — a cent per employee usually means a rule is wrong, not a rounding issue.

Sign-off

Get the payroll owner to sign off the parallel comparison in writing. Store it under Documents.

Go live

1. Freeze changes in the old system
2. Re-import any employee changes made during the parallel period
3. Run and finalise the first live period
4. Distribute payslips and export the bank file
5. File the EMP201 from Payroll Africa

After go-live

Keep the old system readable for at least one full tax year so you can answer any SARS query about a pre-migration period.