An organisation moving its payroll operation onto Tyler MUNIS needed roughly ten years of Paylocity history to stay accessible for around 200 employees — without paying for Paylocity indefinitely, and without forcing a decade of transactions into the new ERP. Syntra ETL made DataVault the system of record for the complete history, used DataMove to migrate only the balances and transactions MUNIS actually operates on, and put DataLens in front of the archive for search, Employee 360° and payroll reporting. Complete retention, a simpler ERP migration, and a Paylocity tenant that could finally be switched off.
Ten years of payroll history had to remain retrievable after Paylocity was retired — for employee queries, statutory obligations, audits and W-2 requests. The two obvious ways of achieving that were both wrong.
Keep Paylocity running. The organisation would carry a licensed payroll platform indefinitely, used by nobody, purely so that somebody can occasionally look up a pay statement from six years ago. The cost recurs every year and never buys anything new.
Load everything into Tyler MUNIS. Ten years of payroll transactions pushed through MUNIS import interfaces means a far larger migration, far more mapping and reconciliation, a longer timeline and materially more risk — to land history the new ERP will never transact against. The migration gets harder in direct proportion to how much dead history it carries.
The third option is to stop treating retention and migration as the same problem. Retention is a lookup requirement. Migration is an operational requirement. They deserve different destinations — which is exactly what the hybrid architecture does.
One extraction, two destinations. The complete history goes to the archive; only the operationally required subset goes to the ERP.
Nothing is lost. The full ten-year Paylocity dataset is preserved, independent of both the retired source and the new ERP.
Only the balances and transactions with an operational, statutory or reporting purpose are transformed into MUNIS import format — which is less mapping, less reconciliation and less risk.
Because historical access no longer depends on the source application, decommissioning becomes a decision rather than an aspiration.
Fourteen data areas, covering the payroll transactions and the surrounding context needed to make sense of them.
See the Paylocity payroll data archival solution and the Paylocity connector.
DataMove ran a single pipeline serving both destinations: extract → profile → map → transform → validate → reconcile → load.
Source information ingested through whichever mechanism the tenant actually supports — data extracts, APIs, reports or files — rather than assuming one interface exists.
Source data analysed for missing values, duplicate records, invalid dates, employee and payroll-period relationships, and historical inconsistencies — before any of it was trusted.
For the subset destined for the ERP, Paylocity structures were transformed into the format required by the agreed Tyler MUNIS import interfaces — the design confirmed against the customer's actual MUNIS configuration and available imports.
Validations run on both sides of every load, so exceptions surfaced and were resolved before migration sign-off rather than after it.
Related: Tyler Technologies data migration · extraction tool · data validation.
Most payroll enquiries start with a person, not a report. Somebody asks about one employee and one year, then follows the thread. So instead of leaving IT to query historical tables, an authorised user searches for the employee once and navigates.
Search runs on employee ID or name, payroll year, pay period, check or payment date, department, earnings type, deduction type, tax year and employment status — through a browser, with no access to Paylocity and no database query.
A standard payroll report set runs against the archive rather than against Paylocity — which is precisely what lets it keep working after the source is decommissioned. All support filtering, drill-down and export to Excel, CSV or PDF.
Customer-specific Paylocity reports were identified during discovery and recreated in DataLens where a continuing requirement existed. See historical reporting and the historical reporting solution.
A payroll archive has to provide evidence, not assurance — particularly when the source is going to be switched off. Reconciliation ran at three levels.
Paylocity employee records equal archive employee records; Paylocity payroll transactions equal archive payroll transactions.
Gross pay, net pay, earnings, deductions, employee taxes, employer taxes, and payroll totals by period and by year — the figures an auditor would actually check.
Paylocity document count equals archive document count for W-2s and pay statements. Exceptions were identified and resolved before final sign-off.
More on this: migration reconciliation · payroll & HR data archival.
Historical payroll is among the most sensitive data an organisation holds — compensation, bank details, tax identifiers, garnishments. The archive was built accordingly.
The migration side of the hybrid was deliberately narrow: only the historical balances and transactions with an operational, statutory or reporting purpose inside the new ERP. Candidate objects were confirmed against the customer's MUNIS configuration and its available import interfaces.
Each load reconciled source-to-MUNIS.
Look-up data — retrieved through DataLens, not transacted against.
Related: Tyler Technologies connector · Tyler data archival · cutover strategy.
This engagement is the clearest expression of how the three products divide the job.
Extraction from Paylocity through whichever mechanism was available, data profiling, mapping, transformation into Tyler MUNIS import format, validation and the loads themselves — one pipeline feeding both destinations.
The system of record for the complete ten-year history — long-term retention, source-data preservation, employee and payroll-period relationships, document retention, reconciliation evidence, role-based access, auditability and retention management.
The business-access layer over the archive — browser-based search, the Employee 360° historical view, the thirteen standard payroll reports, drill-down and export. What business users actually touch.
Because the migration gets harder in direct proportion to how much dead history it carries. Ten years of payroll transactions pushed through MUNIS import interfaces means more mapping, more transformation, more reconciliation, a longer timeline and more risk — to land data the ERP will never transact against. Retention is a lookup requirement; migration is an operational one. Separating them keeps the ERP migration small and the history complete.
Because it means paying for a licensed payroll platform indefinitely, used by nobody, purely so somebody can occasionally retrieve an old pay statement. Making the archive the system of record for history gives the organisation an independent historical payroll repository and removes the reason to keep renewing.
Fourteen data areas across roughly ten years: employee and employment records; payroll runs and pay periods; earnings, deductions and taxes; payroll-related benefit deductions; direct deposits; pay statements; W-2 history; payroll adjustments; YTD balances; organisation data such as department, location, position and cost centre; and historical audit information where the source provides it.
Through DataLens in a browser. Search by employee ID or name, payroll year, pay period, check or payment date, department, earnings type, deduction type, tax year or employment status; open the Employee 360° view to move from profile through employment history, payroll history, earnings and deductions, taxes, pay statements, W-2s, YTD balances and adjustments; or run any of the thirteen standard payroll reports with filtering, drill-down and export to Excel, CSV or PDF.
Three levels of reconciliation. Record reconciliation matches employee records and payroll transactions between source and archive. Payroll control totals reconcile gross pay, net pay, earnings, deductions, employee and employer taxes, and payroll totals by period and by year. Document reconciliation matches W-2 and pay-statement counts. Exceptions were identified and resolved before final sign-off.
All three, each with a distinct job. DataMove extracts, profiles, maps, transforms, validates and loads — feeding both the archive and Tyler MUNIS from one pipeline. DataVault is the system of record for the complete ten-year history, with retention, relationships, documents, reconciliation evidence and auditability. DataLens is the business-access layer: search, Employee 360°, reports and export.
No — the hybrid split is the general answer whenever an organisation replaces a payroll or HR system and has years of history behind it. We used the same reasoning moving a security workforce from UKG Ready to Workday, and the archive-only version of it when a health system retired Kronos.
You almost certainly do not need all of it in the new system — and you almost certainly cannot delete it either. Tell us your source platform, your target and your retention obligations, and we will split it the right way.
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