Paycom data archival in queryable Parquet. Multi-year pay history, W-2/941/1095-C forms, FLSA records, garnishments, benefits and talent — partitioned by tax year, state and BU. IRS 4yr, FLSA 3yr, ACA 3yr, ERISA 6yr retention enforced.
After migrating to Fusion HCM/Payroll, keeping Paycom live just for historical access burns six figures per year. Archival captures the data once, holds it for the full retention window, costs 5–10% of the live subscription.
Paycom per-employee-per-month pricing is well-tuned for active employees — but it doesn't decay after employees leave or after you migrate to a different platform. A 2,000-employee customer paying $10 PEPM is spending $240K per year. After Fusion go-live, that $240K is buying nothing except read access to historical W-2s, 941s, 1095-Cs, pay history and audit substantiation. The same data, archived to cloud object storage in Parquet, costs $5K–$25K per year to store and query — depending on volume.
Syntra ETL's paycom data archival is purpose-built for this scenario. The same Paycom REST extractors that feed Fusion migration also feed the archive — same OAuth pattern, same hash-signed Parquet output, same audit log. The difference is the retention policy at the destination: instead of loading to Fusion's transactional tables, data lands in cloud object storage with lifecycle rules tied to IRS, FLSA, ACA, ERISA and state retention requirements.
What makes the archive useful (not just a tape backup) is the query layer. Every Parquet partition is registered against Athena/BigQuery/Snowflake. Every employee record is indexed for direct lookup. A self-serve portal lets HR produce a W-2 reissue in minutes. A DOL audit gets answered in hours, not weeks. An ex-employee data request is closed before it escalates.
No on-prem servers, no DBA team, no surprise scaling bills. Cloud object storage + columnar Parquet + serverless query.
S3, GCS or Azure Blob as the archive substrate. Object Lock / Bucket Lock / Immutable Blob enforce retention. Lifecycle rules expire on schedule. 11 9's durability.
Columnar format partitioned by tax_year × state × business_unit. Queries scan only relevant partitions — full-archive scans rare, query latency stays predictable as archive grows.
Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake or Oracle ADW external table — pay per query, not per cluster-hour. Most archive queries cost cents, not dollars.
Every record carries SHA-256 hash from extract time. Tamper-evident archive provable in court for SOX, DOL, IRS audits.
Encryption at rest with KMS / Cloud HSM / Azure Key Vault customer-managed keys. Encryption in transit with TLS 1.3. Access logged for SOC 2.
Per-state partitioning lets retention rules vary state-by-state. California 4yr UI, Pennsylvania 4yr, Florida 5yr, Massachusetts 4yr — each enforced independently.
A repeatable rollout. Most customers have a production-ready paycom data archival pipeline running within 3 weeks.
Catalog Paycom domains in scope (HR, Payroll, Time, Benefits, Talent, Compliance), map each to applicable retention rule (IRS 4yr, FLSA 3yr/2yr, ACA 3yr, ERISA 6yr, state UI 4-7yr), define partition strategy.
Provision cloud object storage with Object Lock or equivalent, configure lifecycle rules per retention tag, set up customer-managed encryption keys, register Athena/BigQuery/Snowflake external tables.
Paycom REST extractors pull full history (typically 7+ years) across all in-scope domains, output as hash-signed Parquet partitioned by tax_year × state × BU, land in archive substrate.
HR/payroll-ops self-serve portal for W-2 reissue, single-employee pay history, garnishment lookup, ACA coverage retrieval. RBAC configured per role. PII column-masking applied.
Audit-signed reconciliation: row counts per domain per tax year, hash-signed manifest, SHA-256 of every Parquet file, retention-tag inventory. Sign-off pack handed to compliance and internal audit.
Paycom subscription dropped to read-only minimum (or fully cancelled if a snapshot is sufficient). Archive serves all historical access. Annual cost falls 85–95%.
Six use cases that justify the archive — and frequently pay for the migration project on their own.
Ex-employees can request replacement W-2s for 7 years post-separation. Self-serve portal regenerates the PDF from archived data in minutes — no Paycom subscription required.
Wage-hour audits, payroll tax examinations, ACA affordability reviews — answered from the archive in hours, not weeks. Hash-signed evidence pack delivered to the auditor.
State unemployment audits triggered by claim disputes get answered from per-state archive partitions. California, NY, FL, PA, MA each retain their own data on the right schedule.
Form 1095-C generation, IRS Letter 226-J response, coverage history reviews — served from archived enrollment and 1095-C data with 3-year retention.
Litigation hold on payroll data for active matters — archive supports legal-hold tags that override normal retention expiry, with chain-of-custody evidence.
Multi-year workforce trends, compensation analytics, attrition modeling — queryable in Snowflake/BigQuery alongside Fusion data via federated query, no extract step needed.
Paycom data archival is the practice of extracting employee, paycheck, deduction, garnishment, W-2, 1095-C, time-and-attendance, benefits and talent history from a live Paycom tenant and moving it to a long-term cloud-based archive in queryable Parquet format. Syntra ETL's paycom data archival builds an immutable, hash-signed archive partitioned by tax year and business unit, with retention rules aligned to IRS Form W-2 (4 yr), Form 941 (4 yr), FLSA records (3 yr), ACA Form 1095-C (3 yr), state unemployment (4–7 yr) and ERISA 401(k) records (6 yr). Archives stay queryable for the full retention window through Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift or Oracle ADW — at a fraction of the cost of keeping the Paycom subscription live.
Paycom pricing is per-employee-per-month (typically $5–15 PEPM). For a 2,000-employee customer, that runs $120K–$360K per year. After migrating to Oracle Fusion HCM/Payroll, the live Paycom tenant is no longer needed for current operations — but the data still has to be retained for IRS, FLSA, ACA and ERISA requirements for 3–7 years. Paying $200K+ per year to keep Paycom alive purely for historical access is wasteful. Paycom data archival captures the full history once, moves it to a cloud archive at 5–10% of the live-subscription annual cost, and serves W-2 reissue, DOL audits, IRS examinations and ex-employee data requests for the full retention window. ROI on the archive vs. live subscription is typically 12–18 months.
Everything statutorily required and everything operationally useful. Statutorily required: employee master, pay history with gross-to-net detail, deductions, garnishments, tax withholdings, YTD/QTD/MTD balances, W-2 forms, 941 quarterly returns, ACA 1095-C forms with coverage history, state unemployment filings, ERISA 401(k) data, and underlying punch records for FLSA. Operationally useful: benefits enrollment history, dependents, beneficiaries, COBRA records, performance reviews, goals, succession data, learning history, and any custom-field tags carried in Paycom. The archive is queryable as Parquet — so ad-hoc lookups, regulatory reports and analytical queries all work without restoring data into a transactional system.
Retention is enforced through cloud-native lifecycle policies. Each Paycom data domain in the archive carries a retention tag: W-2 records carry IRS-4yr, 941 quarterlies carry IRS-4yr, 1095-C carries ACA-3yr, FLSA payroll records carry FLSA-3yr, FLSA timekeeping carries FLSA-2yr, state unemployment carries state-specific (4–7yr depending on state), ERISA 401(k) records carry ERISA-6yr (or longer per plan rules), and HIPAA-relevant health records carry self-insured-plan retention. Cloud object storage lifecycle rules (S3 Object Lock, GCS Bucket Lock, Azure Immutable Blob) hold objects immutable for the retention window and only allow expiration on the schedule. Every read access is logged for SOX and audit substantiation.
US multi-state payroll layers complexity onto retention. State unemployment retention varies (California requires 4 yr, New York 4 yr, Florida 5 yr, Pennsylvania 4 yr, Massachusetts 4 yr, but many states require 6–7 yr); state withholding records vary; local jurisdictions (NYC, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Newark) add their own requirements. Syntra ETL's paycom data archival partitions archives not just by tax year and BU but by Payroll Statutory Unit and state — so retention rules can be enforced per state per record type. Queries against the archive can be scoped to a specific state's records for a state unemployment audit without scanning the full enterprise dataset.
Yes — and this is one of the primary use cases. Former employees can request W-2 reissues for 7 years after separation under IRS rules, and your obligation to issue replacements continues even after Paycom is decommissioned. Syntra ETL's paycom data archival keeps the original W-2 PDFs (if Paycom generated them) plus the underlying W-2 data (employee, tax year, box totals, state info) in the archive. A self-serve portal lets HR or payroll ops produce a replacement W-2 in minutes — querying the archive, regenerating the PDF, delivering to the requesting ex-employee. No need to keep Paycom live, no need to call up an old payroll vendor with limited support.
Three interfaces, all running against the same hash-signed Parquet archive. Athena/BigQuery/Snowflake SQL for direct analytical query — useful for finance, HR analytics teams and data scientists running large historical analyses. A pre-built self-serve portal for HR/payroll/audit teams running standard lookups (single-employee pay history, W-2 reissue, garnishment history, ACA coverage record) without writing SQL. And REST API access for downstream tools and integrations — same OAuth-style scoped credentials, same audit log, suitable for embedding into other applications that need read access to historical Paycom data.
Access control mirrors the original Paycom tenant's security posture, hardened for archival. Role-based access (RBAC) enforced at the query layer: HR analyst can query her own BU, payroll ops can query payroll-related domains, audit can query everything, ex-employee self-service can query only their own records. Every query logged with user-id, query text, rows returned, timestamp — feeds SIEM and SOX evidence. PII fields can be column-masked for analytical use cases (workforce demographics) and unmasked only for legitimate operational use (W-2 reissue). Encryption at rest with customer-managed keys (KMS, Cloud HSM, Azure Key Vault); encryption in transit with TLS 1.3.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll walk through your Paycom data volume, retention requirements per IRS/FLSA/ACA/state, and produce a sized archival plan with annual cost — typically 5–10% of your current Paycom subscription.