Understanding Retroactive Adjustments to General Ledger Data

Regardless of the payroll system's retroactive mode—which can be corrective or forwarding—the GL calculations are always done in corrective mode. This means that all prior transactions for the retroactive period are reversed and new transactions are created for all entries from the recalculated results. This ensures that not only changes to amounts but also changes to chartfields and account assignments are reflected in the updated transactions. As a consequence, the numbers from the current period are always transferred to GL net of any forwarded adjustments.

This "corrective treatment" of the payroll results are not to be confused with the processing on the GL side. All transactions are posted based on the posting date given by the user when the GL process is kicked off and are not related to the original dates of the retroactive period, as those books are probably closed.

In January a deduction with a payment of 100 is posted to GL account 210003, the account associated with ChartField Department 1. There is a change in payroll that triggers retroactive processing, and you realize that the employee whose payment was posted in January was really in Department 2, not Department 1. Deductions associated with Department 2 should be posted to GL account 210004.

This table summarizes the results that are sent to the General Ledger . The system will reversal original posting and post the correct account for the January Run.

Month	Original Calendar Group	Amount	Account #	Action
January	January	100	210003	Resolution (last period)
February	January	–100	210003	Reversal
February	January	100	210004	Repost to Correct Account
February	February	100	21004	Current Period

In case of segmentation mismatch, the system always uses current results plus adjustments and posts results to the last available segment.