Sage 50 Payroll running slow

How to troubleshoot performance issues when using Sage 50 Payroll

If Sage 50 Payroll appears to be running slowly this can be caused by a number of reasons, including the following:

• The specification of your computer doesn't meet the recommended requirements
• Your database is large
• You're experiencing networking issues, such as as a large amount of network traffic
• You don't have the required NTFS permissions to access Sage 50 Payroll
• Your software is blocked from accessing the Internet by a proxy server, firewall, or your antivirus software
• The path to your data in the Paydata.txt file is incorrect

Computer specification

Visit our system requirements for Sage 50 Payroll article to check your computer specification against the requirements.

If the computer has lower than recommended specification, you're likely to encounter performance issues. We recommend you upgrade your computer.

---

Run a repair and compact on your database

To help reduce the size of your database and improve speed, for example, of the Pension Assessment option in the Pensions Module, you can run a repair and compact on your database.

We recommend that you take a backup before repairing and compacting your database.

---

Check pay elements

Removing any unused or unnecessary pay elements from your employees' records may help with performance.

Remove a pay element if it does not contain YTD values for the employee

1. Click Employee, select the required employee then click Employee Record.
2. Click Employment, then click Pay Elements.
3. Select the required pay element, press F8, then click Yes.

Remove a pay element if it contains YTD values for the employee

If the pay element contains YTD values, you cannot delete it by pressing F8. Instead you must remove it using Global Changes, however, you must be sure that you no longer want to report on the pay element values.

1. Select the relevant employees, click Tasks, click Global Changes, click Payments, then click Remove Payment.
2. Select the payment, click OK, click Yes, then click OK.

---

Check your Paydata.txt file contains the correct data location

1. Open Sage 50 Payroll, click Help, click About, then check the Program Details section.
2. Note the Data directory, excluding the files that contain your data.
   • For example, if your data directory is C:\ProgramData\Sage\Payroll\Company_001\Paydata\Payroll.mdb, Company_001 is the folder that contains your data. Therefore you should note C:\ProgramData\Sage\Payroll.
3. Check the Settings directory, then locate the file PayData.txt and open it in Notepad.
4. Confirm the path displayed in your paydata.txt is the file that you noted in Step 1. If the path is incorrect, amend it to show the correct path to the Company_001 folder.
5. Click File, click Save, click File, then click Exit.

---

Check ODBC buffer size

1. Close Sage 50 Payroll and all other software.
2. Press the Windows key + R, enter odbcad32, then click OK.
3. For 64-bit Windows, browse to C:\Windows\SysWow64, locate and double-click odbcad32.exe
4. Click the System DSN tab, select Payroll 32, then click Configure.
5. Click Options, ensure the Buffer Size is 4096, click OK, then click OK.

---

Check ODBC Tracing is switched off

When ODBC Tracing is activated, every function call made by the ODBC driver is recorded in a text file called sql.log.

 CAUTION: You may have tracing activated for a particular reason. Take note that stopping tracing is done at your own discretion and you should refer to your local IT support for further advice. 

To give an indication of the amount of information being recorded, opening up a company in Sage 50 Payroll created approximately 1.2Mb or 550 pages of text in the sql.log file.

If you decide to turn off ODBC tracing, follow the steps below.

1. Close Sage 50 Payroll and all other software.
2. Press the Windows key + R, enter odbcad32, then click OK.
   • For 64-bit Windows, browse to C:\Windows\SysWow64, then locate and double-click odbcad32.exe
3. Under the Tracing tab, if the button at the top left-hand corner is labelled Stop Tracing Now, select it.
    NOTE: If the button is labelled Start Tracing Now, ODBC Tracing isn't activated. 

---