Tax Year Locking
Tax Year Locking is a control feature designed to protect historical payroll data, preserve audit trails, and maintain compliance. Locking a tax year prevents users from inadvertently modifying, deleting, or adding pay runs for periods that are finalized or not yet ready for processing.
Applies to: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom
Overview & System Impact
Locking a tax year applies directly at the subsidiary level and controls payroll processing capabilities across the system.
Locked Status Restrictions:
All action buttons on pay runs within the locked period are disabled (greyed out).
Existing pay runs in the locked period cannot be edited, recalculated, or deleted.
No new pay runs can be created within the locked period.
Future Year Locking: You can lock upcoming tax years in advance to prevent users from processing payroll until the organization is ready to begin that year.
Locking by Subsidiary: Tax year locking is configured per subsidiary. If you operate multiple subsidiaries and want to lock the same years across all of them, repeat the process for each subsidiary individually.
How to Lock a Tax Year
🔑 Permissions Required: Administrator or Payroll Administrator role.
Log in with an Administrator or Payroll Administrator role.
Navigate to Payroll > Payroll Setup > Tax Year Locking.
Tax Year Locking navigation path On the Tax Year Locking page, set the status for each year to Locked or Unlocked as needed. You can lock a single year or multiple years at once.
Click Save.
Once saved, verify that the system confirmation banner appears at the top of the page.
Unlocking a Tax Year & Audit Trail
If a locked tax year needs to be reopened to make historical corrections, an authorized user can change its status back to Unlocked.
To maintain internal controls and audit compliance:
When unlocking a year, the system prompts you to enter a Reason for Unlocking.
Unlock Tax Year with mandatory reason input field Once saved, the system automatically logs a permanent entry in the Audit Trail, recording:
Date and Time: Exact timestamp of the unlocking action.
User: The specific user account that performed the unlock.
Reason: The justification provided during the prompt.
Scope: The subsidiary and tax year modified.