Help generating pay stubs

[springcreek]

I''m a new user of community edition. i set up my employees, policies etc.
We pay semi-monthly so I created a pay period for June 1- June 15 and set up the opening balances to bring over the YTD amounts we've paid from our previous system.
I tried to generate a pay stub for the first pay period June 16-30 and it told me I couldn't generate pay stubs when a prior period was open.
So I then closed the prior pay period. Now When I go to "generate pay stub" for the period June 16-30 it says "unable to create pay stubs in a closed pay period" Confusing since this period is not closed. This seems to be an impossible feedback loop.

I've read through the administrator manual and it seems to be lacking on the steps for actually generating a pay stub. What am I missing?
Thanks

[mikeb]

Did you manually create the individual pay periods yourself, or modify the dates on them recently by chance?

Can you also attach a full uncropped screenshot showing the error message itself?

[springcreek]

I manually created the pay periods. Ok, strangely now it is working. The only thing I did was log out and log back in again a few days later.

[mikeb]

If you manually create or modify pay periods, you need to be somewhat careful, as data is linked to pay periods directly at the time such data is created. So if you create them late, or modify their dates, you must perform additional actions to "sync" or "import" the data, or risk having things out-of-sync and causing a ton of headaches for yourself. This is why we highly recommend that you use pay period schedules so the entire process is automated for you and it eliminates this issue completely.

Anytime pay period dates are manually changed, you must go to Payroll -> Pay Periods, select the pay period that was changed, click the More (...) icon at the top right, then click "Import Data" to re-synchronize it.

Under normal circumstances, this process should never need to be done.