Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (USA/CAN)

Activate User's Guide

Version
2025.1
Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (USA/CAN)

Important: For Canadian Commercial customers (customers with fewer than 300 employees) to access the Year-to-Date Payroll Totals wizard, click Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (CAN.

To convert data from legacy to Dayforce, you must import year-to-date data for your payroll codes. Use the Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (USA/CAN) wizard to make sure that your deductions, earnings, and taxes are loaded into the system correctly. The code names and descriptions are installed per the configuration shown on the final page in the wizard.

When codes are grouped, the group name and group description determine the installed code name and description. The name is derived from the description and the description is derived from the mapped to the earnings tax and compliance code.

Complete this task to ensure that the mapping is correct from the legacy system to Dayforce and the data is correct. At Go Live, data is successfully imported in anticipation of the year-end data being filed correctly for taxation and government purposes.

This wizard uses the most up-to-date information from the US Tax Services to make sure that the wage and tax reporting is accurate.

Important notes

  • Activate generates the Year-to-Date Import file with the ContributeToNetPay field populated based on the earning code that’s specific to the employees' respective pay group country. When the USA and CAN have shared earning definitions in Dayforce (differing earning types between earning codes of countries), Activate uses the correct tax and compliance code to determine the ContributeToNetPay value.
  • This wizard is available only for USA/CAN organizations.
  • The Organizational Hierarchy wizard won’t be available for use after you complete the following: a Job History (with the Employee Job History & Secondary Work Assignment wizard), or a YTD Load (with the Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (USA/CAN) wizard or the Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (CAN) wizard).
  • You can use any of the following wizards, even if any of the others is currently in use by other users: Payroll Deduction Codes, Payroll Earning Codes, Payroll Tax Codes, Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (USA/CAN).
  • Activate shares all of your mappings across all applicable environments so you don't have to reconfigure each time you use a different environment. If the changes you make in one environment invalidate the mappings in another environment, Activate notifies you when you access a wizard with invalid mappings that need to be updated.
  • If the Allow Future Dated Import setting is enabled in Dayforce (Pay Group > Payroll Properties), you can import Year-to-Date data into an ongoing/future pay period in Activate. Doing this gives you more time to prep the Go Live data loads (for example, complete mappings and validations) and you won’t have to wait until the period ends to begin the Year-to-Date process.
  • The Getting Started wizard installed Canadian employees with a culture code of EN-CA.
  • Activate users with Preceda selected as the Ascender Migration Type can use this wizard to select more than one file to upload from your computer in a single step. See Preceda Centralized Data Loads.
  • This wizard uses the most up-to-date information from the US Tax Services.

Prerequisites

The following wizards must already be completed and the codes installed in Dayforce:

Key concepts

Using this wizard

You’ll do the following in the Year-to-Date Payroll Totals (UK) wizard:

Messages: Error, Warning, and Information

Activate sorts each generated message by severity:

Tasks

Results

Dayforce now contains the YTD Data that was imported using the installation. The pay period that was used in the legacy system is now considered Committed data, The Taxation, and the calculation parameters are now locked down on each earning and deduction code that was used in this pay period. These parts of the Payroll codes are now in unmodifiable states.

Note: When the installation completes, you can download the Mapping Files, which are used as a basis for any future YTD load, as follows: Go to the User Menu (Person Icon), select Troubleshooting Resources, and then select the appropriate mapping under Customer Mapping Templates to download the file as an Excel spreadsheet.

Next steps

Review the pay period used for the YTD Load in Dayforce and validate against the legacy payroll for accuracy in mapping.

Complete the next wizard, as appropriate.

Commonly encountered issues

Before you upload the template, make sure that there are no errors in the data. Some commonly encountered problems include:

  • Missing required fields or data.
  • The Tax YTD Data tab is missing in the Excel document.
  • Incorrect formatting.
  • If the file includes a filter, it might result in an error.

If a column has an error that you can't resolve, click the letter at the top of the column and do the following: in the menu, select Data and Text to Columns, and then click Next, Next, and Finish. The data in the column is converted back to text. This action might resolve the problem if the information was formatted incorrectly.

YTD Data template fields

All templates have the same basic structure:

  • Instructions tab: Helps you understand the purpose of the data and complete the fields in the template.
  • Data tab: Contains headers for the data to be included in the template. The headers remain the same, but you can change the column order. If you add more columns, Activate ignores them.

All number ranges in the templates include the numbers at both ends of the range.

Deduction YTD Data Template Fields

Tax YTD Data Template Fields