A couple of years ago around this time of year, I got a call from a client of mine with a strange error in Canadian Payroll.  At the time, I ran into other significant issues in trying to help with said error, and at the time, I blogged/ranted about it here.

Fast forward to last month, when I received an email from another customer who was asking me "Did I ever find out what the issue was with that error? We are having the same problem now!". We exchanged emails and I researched what notes I had taken at the time, and in the end, she confirmed for me that what worked for my client also worked for her.

So, this post is just an update on the issue and at least one resolution, in case it helps someone else out there. Some of this is a repeat of the rant blog, without the rant!

The Issue

The client's error message was "Account Number does not exist". This occurred when they were creating the poster file in Canadian Payroll, after running their payroll successfully that week. They'd been live for several years so the fact that now of all times a new random error came up was a little odd.

The Resolution

The accounting in Canadian Payroll is fairly straightforward: each paycode has an account number and in the main Setup window, the option is to identify if the account number should be "masked", say, to go to an employee's department segment in the GL. The biggest complication is usually forgetting to set the masked value in the department setup or the combination of the paycode's account and the masked value doesn't exist. Those are pretty easy to spot.

The other most common source of Account Missing types of errors is usually figured out immediately upon running the first payroll tests after configuration: some default account in a setup window wasn't populated with the default GL account.

This error was strange and random. The good news: both my client and the person who contacted me through the blog comments found the same common issue, and it resolved this error:

  • The company setup (Canadian Payroll Control window) had "Allow Banked Leave GL Accrual" set to No while the employee in question had their field set to Yes.
  • In both cases, this only popped up when the employee was taking vacation, and it was looking at the account setting to identify where to reduce the accrued vacation.

So, sounds simple but annoyingly random! Hopefully, if anyone else finds the same error, this may help them resolve it too.