Phantom Pay Stub Amendments (& problem generating pay stubs)

[BryanB]

I'm having trouble generating pay stubs for the current pay period.

TimeTrex appears to show 4 phantom pay stub amendments which is preventing the pay stubs from being generated.

Screen shot of "End of Pay Period" screen.

Screen shot of the "End of Pay Period" screen

Clicking on "View" for the "Pay Stub Amendments" brings this screen.

Attempting to generate pay stubs generates this screen which remains for a very, very, very long time. (In fact, I've never seen it complete even after waiting for 20+ minutes.)

TimeTrex Ver. :3.6.0 (OnSite)
Windows XP

I *did* create a pay stub amendment two weeks ago for worker's comp. I do not remember the exact steps I took nor the exact name I used; but I believe I set the item up to automatically calculate for each pay stub. However, since the amendment did not function the way I intended, I deleted the "Worker's Comp" item in the Pay Stub account list.

I do *not* believe I deleted the pay stub amendments (or selected no employees for the amendment) *prior* to deleting the "Worker's comp" item in the Pay Stub account list. I believe this may be what's causing the problem.

How do I rid TimeTrex of the "Phantom" pay stub amendments to complete the pay period?

[shaunw]

Deleting the pay stub account that was being used by the pay stub amendments was the cause of this issue. I have passed this on to our developers to correct in the next version of TimeTrex.

In the mean time, the only way to fix the issue is to access the database directly and undelete the pay stub account, or reinstall and start over again from scratch.

[BryanB]

Ack! That's what I was afraid of. (And, reinstalling from scratch won't be too difficult; just mildly annoying.)

Can you give me an idea of what files to look for for the database and what part of the database (once I get to it) to make the changes in?

Thanks!

[shaunw]

Unfortunately if you aren't familiar with SQL databases, its not an easy process at all.

[BryanB]

I'm not terribly familiar with SQL databases but I was able to solve the problem without a complete reinstall.

I found the daily backups in the TimeTrex directory ("timetrex_database_<date>.sql") and edited the most recent one. I found the lines that had the paystub amendments by searching for the name of the amendment. Deleted those lines (there were four of them; for four employees) after making sure they looked like the right ones (I'm familiar enough with software and the like to make the judgement call.) Found another instance of the name and deleted that line, too. (Again, making sure it looked like the right line to delete.)

Then, pretending I was migrating the database from one computer to another (really from directory to directory), I followed the steps at:

http://www.timetrex.com/wiki/index.php/ ... another.3F

I don't necessarily recommend this procedure but it did work for me. And, since I was about to start from scratch, I figured I had nothing to lose by trying this.

[shaunw]

Good job, thats a much more advanced procedure than most people would attempt.

For future reference, the easier approach would have been to find the pay_stub_entry table then find the pay stub account that was deleted, finally change its deleted column to 0 rather than 1. You could do this for all rows in the pay_stub_entry table too, as there isn't that many.

Then once the database is restored again you should be able to see all pay stub amendments and delete them before deleting the pay stub account itself.