ANTHISTLE SYSTEMS & PROGRAMMING LTD.
563 Patricia Drive,
Oakville, Ontario,
CANADA L6K 1M4

Telephone 905-845-7959


PAYROLL USA - REGISTERED USER RELEASE V5.41 22nd. FEB. 1999
===========================================================

I have set a new record for being late this year.  It was due to massive 
changes in the Canadian T4 form (our equivalent of the W-2).  Nothing to 
do with Payroll USA except that Payroll USA has a sister program called 
Payroll Canada, I do the programming for both, and there is only one of 
me.   Like the W-2, the T4 has a government imposed filing deadline so 
it had to be given a high priority.  Those Payroll USA customers who 
marked the box on the order form to indicate they were affected by the 
change in the W-2 form (W-2 Box 15 had 2 of its 7 small check boxes 
deleted and the remaining 5 repositioned) were sent a preliminary 1999 
release on 12th. January containing only the Federal and California tax 
changes, and the W-2 change.  As the US Federal tax changes were minor 
(and adjustable anyway when tax returns are filed) the next priority was 
to complete and release the Payroll Canada changes, including a new 
Windows program to handle the complete redesign of the T4.  Only then 
was I able to give some thought to how to improve Payroll USA for 1999.    
I thought I would be done by 5th. February and had the release letters 
printed with that date, but I kept thinking of additional changes and 
thought it best to take the extra couple of weeks to do a proper job of 
it.

I do apologize for the extra delay.  The T4 change caught me by surprise 
in December, and it was so radical a change that it took quite a while 
for me to program.  That is a one off type of situation, Revenue Canada 
(our IRS) have never done that big of a T4 change before.  I know there 
have been inconveniences, particularly with my long winded message about 
taxes being obsolete being displayed every time you start the program, 
but I think you will find the wait worthwhile as I have made some useful 
changes to Payroll USA (as detailed below).  One change you will not 
notice until next year was the addition of a way of bypassing the above 
mentioned long winded message, one keystroke and it is gone.

Note the enclosed disk is High Density format which is suitable for all 
but the oldest computers.  If you have an old computer with Low Density 
drives and cannot read the enclosed then call us for a replacement.


TAXES 
-----

Federal Taxes updated to January 1999, this includes every tax specified 
in the IRS Circular E, Employer's Tax Guide.

California Income Tax updated to January 1999.  We use California as our 
default taxes so if we can get a hold of a copy of the California 
Employer's Tax Guide before we finalize everything else we update them 
for the new release.

State and Local Taxes are a user responsibility so we do not do updates 
for any other State and cannot guarantee to do California every year. If 
you are in California and want the program to update State income taxes 
for you then

From the PAYROLL USA MAIN PAY MENU select:
	F5 CONFIGURATION & OTHER UTILITIES, then select
	F4 CHANGE CONFIGURATION - DISKS, PROMPTS, TAXES, ETC.,
	then select
		F6 State Taxes

If the program detects you are a California user, and if the taxes you 
had previously set up do not exactly match 1999, the program will offer 
to update them for you.  It does not automatically apply the State Tax 
update unless you go through this procedure and then say yes to the 
offer of an update as it cannot be 100% certain you are a California 
user.


New Features
------------

In my December newsletter I already mentioned Free Magnetic Media W-2's 
also some tests and improvements that were made during 1998:  Year 2000 
Compatibility, Big Hard Drive Compatibility, Fast CPU Compatibility, 
Windows 98 Compatibility, Multiple Employee Files Fix, Social Security 
Number Range Extended.  Customers who had reported problems with any of 
these issues in 1998 had the fix already, this release has all the above 
for everybody.

In addition, in the last few weeks I have made the following changes:

On checks and payslips, the commas at the end of each name and address 
line have been deleted.  One customer suggested the program save the 
laser check line up information.  I thought that was a good idea, and it 
inspired me to take that a stage further.  Printing checks involves a 
lot of decisions (like 1 or 2 stubs, check before or after stub, print 
phone number, etc.) that are input to the program each time.  If I am 
going to save the line up I thought I may as well save the other 
repeated input as well.  So, the first time you print checks or payslips 
with the new version, it will behave as before, but it will be recording 
your choices.  The next time you print checks or payslips for the same 
employee file it will display what you did last time, ask if that is 
still OK, and if it is it will automatically follow your preferences.

A customer also suggested the employee pick list (used when entering 
hours or other changes to employee information) return with the same 
employee highlighted so it would not be necessary to page through the 
list to find where you were up to.  A good idea, particularly for large 
employee files.  Another suggestion was to have the pay cycle 
automatically mark active any employees who were on vacation - that one 
sounded a little risky as vacation periods, and intervals between pays, 
vary and it might not be appropriate in all cases.  However, it got me 
thinking and if I was going to change the pick list anyway to keep the 
last employee highlighted then I could also alter the selection to show 
all vacationing employees (just vacation) on a separate pick list before 
the regular pick list to remind the user who was away and to provide an 
opportunity to select them and mark them active if they were now back at 
work.  Hours can also be entered at the same time as marking active, if 
preferred.  I then took that a stage further and provided an option to 
remove any employees who remained on vacation from the regular pick 
list.  You should be aware that if you take this option and subsequently 
change an active employee to be on vacation they will immediately 
disappear from the pick list as the list is rebuilt every time it is 
shown.  If you have anything else to do to that employee in this session 
do it at the same time while you have them on the screen (before they 
disappear).

Every year I get customers calling asking how they can remove terminated 
employees from the pick list, the answer has always been you can't, we 
have to keep them on file for W-2 purposes and they are removed only in 
the last pay cycle of the year.   Some businesses have high employee 
turnover and their pick list gets cluttered with terminated people by 
the middle of the year.  My thought was if I am going to offer an option 
to remove vacationing employees from the pick list then why not also 
offer an option to remove terminated and laid off.  So that is what I 
did.   The terminated, laid off, and vacationing employees are of course 
still on the employee file, they are just hidden if you say yes to the 
option.  They are hidden only on the pick list, and only for the current 
session, if you escape back to the main menu and reselect Add or Update 
Employees you will be asked again if you want them removed.  They are 
not hidden from the pay cycle, but it only pays active employees.

For some years now Payroll USA has had the capability of up to 4 pay 
rates for each employee within the same pay period.  These extra 3 pay 
rate slots are shared with overtime, they can either be overtime rates 
or additional rates to cater for special situations like family 
restaurants where the same employee might be a cook (at a cooks rate) 
one day and a wait person (at a different rate) another day.  However, 
the check stubs and other reports still show the hours as "Otime Rate1 
H" and the pay as "Otime R1 Amt".  I have made a change in this release 
to show hours as "Ovtm or R1Hrs" and the pay as "Ovtm or R1Amt" on check 
stubs and reports.  The R1 part of it could also be R2 and R3.  A minor 
change, the best I could do given only 13 characters to work with and 
given that the check and report printing routines do not have access to 
what exactly these amounts are for (as it can be different on an 
employee by employee basis, overtime for one, special rate for another).

A couple of minor changes were also made.  On the basic information 
screen W-2 EMPLOYEE TYPE has been modified so that "942 Employee" is no 
longer a valid choice (as it has been removed from the W-2 form).    In 
the report selected from "Print or Export Employee History by YEAR 
(incl. Mo. & 1/4)"  there was a bug that caused an erroneous warning 
message when full employee details were printed for an employee who had 
only one months pay on the file.  The message said "*** WARNING *** LAST 
QUARTER CANNOT BE VERIFIED, ORIGINAL TOTAL NO LONGER ON FILE".  This has 
been fixed.


System Date and the CMOS Battery Clock (Y2K)
--------------------------------------------

Payroll is a date dependent operation.  I have checked the program will 
work in the year 2000 but I have concerns about the computer's system 
date.  It is used to determine the age of employees, the default pay 
cycle date, report heading dates, and the display of date dependent 
error messages, among other things.   Many computers, particularly older 
computers, have clocks that are not Y2K compliant (more on this 
follows).  I have done two things in this release to try to ensure an 
accurate system date.

1.  When this release of Payroll USA starts it checks the system date.  
If the year is between 1998 and 2018 it assumes it is OK.  If it is 
outside this range it displays both the battery clock date and the 
system date (yes they should be the same, but they may be different in 
year 2000) and then it allows you to reset both to the current date.

2.  For persistent system date problems that occur every time the 
computer is rebooted I am providing a new program called Y2KCLOCK.COM 
that can be called from your c:\autoexec.bat file at each reboot.  An 
explanation of how the date is set, and how to test your computer clock, 
follows.

Your computer has a battery operated clock that runs even when the 
computer is switched off.   When you switch on the computer (or reboot 
it) the operating system (DOS or Windows) asks the BIOS to read the 
clock and supply the operating system with the date and time.  From that 
point until the next reboot the operating system keeps its own date and 
time in a separate clock.  If you change the operating system date or 
time the operating system also tells the BIOS to change the battery 
clock (unless you are running an old version of DOS, early versions do 
not update the battery clock).  The battery clock is otherwise not 
referred to again until it is read at the next reboot. 

We therefore have 3 players involved in setting the date and time: the 
battery clock, the BIOS, (both of which are part of the computer 
hardware) and the operating system.  If any one of the 3 are not set up 
for year 2000 there will be problems next January.   The operating 
system is probably OK, but the risk is in the battery clock or in the 
BIOS as they may be of old design.  The battery clock (also known as the 
"CMOS RTC") is at the highest risk of year 2000 problems.  It stores the 
2 digit century separately from the 2 digit year and it is known that 
some clocks will not roll over the century.  In some clocks this is a 
permanent defect, in others it will not roll over automatically but if 
reset to year 2000 it will maintain 20 in the century.  More recent 
clocks (in computers purchased in the last year or so since Y2K became a 
big issue) should be fully year 2000 compatible.

What will happen at end 1999 is the defective battery clocks roll over 
to 1900 instead of 2000.  At the next reboot DOS asks BIOS for the date 
and gets 1900 which DOS recognizes as an error because DOS can only 
understand dates on or after 01-01-1980 (up to 2099).  Instead of 
displaying an error message DOS signals the error by setting the date to 
01/04/1980 instead of the DOS starting point of 01/01/1980. Invalid BCD 
(binary coded decimal) code in the clock chip will result in the date 
being set to 01/03/1980.

If you want to know in advance how your computer's clock will handle 
year 2000 then follow these steps:

1.  If you have any date sensitive software, like a scheduler, that 
starts automatically when the computer is booted then either disable it 
or do these tests using a DOS boot disk in drive A instead of letting it 
boot from drive C

2.  Set the operating system date to 12-31-1999 and set the time to 
close to midnight, say 23:59:00, then shut down and switch off the 
computer.  (or if it takes a while to shut down set the time a little 
earlier to give yourself a margin).

3.  Wait a minute or so until you are sure the battery clock will have 
passed midnight while the computer is switched off.

4.  Switch the computer back on and let it reboot.  When it is up to its 
normal operating status then check the date and time (in DOS key in DATE 
at the DOS prompt, in Windows check the control panel).  If the date is 
2000 you are probably OK.  If it is less than 2000 there is a potential 
problem, continue to step 5

5.  Reset the operating system date to 2000 then shut down and switch 
off the computer.  Wait 15 or 30 seconds for the hard drive to spin down 
to a stop as it can be damaged by restarting it while it is still 
moving, 

6.  Switch the computer back on and let it reboot.  When it is up to its 
normal operating status then check the date and time (in DOS key in DATE 
at the DOS prompt, in Windows check the control panel).  If the date is 
still 2000 the battery clock held the century change from step 5 and you 
are probably OK.  If it is less than 2000 then the battery clock century 
is likely permanently "stuck" at 19 and you will have date problems at 
every reboot. If the year is less than 2000 then do not reset the date 
for the moment as now is a good time to try running my Y2KCLOCK.COM 
program to see if it works for you.  (At this point your battery clock 
year probably reads 1900, and the system year is probably 1980).  After 
running Y2KCLOCK.COM check the date and time again, with luck they will 
be correct and in the year 2000 (no need to reboot).

What can you do if the battery clock century is permanently "stuck" at 
19 ?   The expensive solution is to replace the computer, but that may 
not be necessary.  Buying a new Y2K compatible CMOS clock chip (about 
$20 or $30) is a possible solution but it is not always easy to install 
them as some clocks are soldered to the circuit board, and even with a 
new clock there may still be a Y2K problem in the BIOS, or the BIOS may 
not be compatible with the new clock. It is possible to replace the BIOS 
chip as well, but only if a new Y2K compliant BIOS is available for your 
computer (or if you know a hacker with an EPROM burner who can dump your 
existing BIOS chip program to disk, erase the chip, and reburn it with a 
new program).  A cheaper solution is to put the DATE and TIME commands 
into your c:\autoexec.bat file which will cause you to be prompted to 
enter the operating system date and time at each reboot.  An even 
simpler solution is a program I have written that I am including with 
Payroll USA.  Insert this line at or near the top of  your 
c:\autoexec.bat file:

C:\PAYPGMS\Y2KCLOCK

This is only needed if you have a clock with a stuck century.  The 
"C:\PAYPGMS\" part of it may need amending if you do not have Payroll 
USA on our default disk and directory.  Y2KCLOCK.COM reads the battery 
clock, if the date read is less than 1995 it adds 100 years to the clock 
date then resets the operating system date.  You can add this line at or 
near the top of your c:\autoexec.bat file now and forget about it so you 
do not have to remember on new years eve to do it.  Y2KCLOCK.COM was 
written in assembler so it will run instantly. It produces some text 
output to explain its function, and does nothing else unless a year of 
1900 through 1994 is read from the battery clock.

Y2KCLOCK.COM should work on most computers, but there is another 
potential problem it probably cannot fix.  Some BIOS's will not accept 
any date with a year outside a given range, example 94-99, so you can 
probably only have 1994 through 1999 or 2094 through 2099 if this were 
the case. If you have one of these monsters then the system date year 
may be set to the low end of the range instead of to 1980 in test step 4 
above.

If you are running a really old version of DOS from the 1980's (like 
vers 3 or earlier) that does not reset the battery clock for date and 
time changes and you are already having problems with inaccurate dates 
and times after every reboot (even before 2000) then you MAY be able to 
reset the battery clock manually (some CMOS's are apparently password 
protected or need an extra [dealer] part to reset them).  Try this, it 
might work:  Before you switch on the computer try holding down the 
space bar (or any other key).  Keep it held down while you switch on and 
the boot process starts, there may be some beeps but ignore them as you 
want to cause a stuck key error which might result in a BIOS message 
that includes an option to start the CMOS setup utility.  Release the 
key and take the setup option.  At this point you are working on a 
computer that has no operating system, you are communicating directly 
with the built in BIOS chip.  Your CMOS settings, including the battery 
clock, are displayed.  It is a good idea to press the PrintScrn key to 
copy this setup screen to the printer before you do anything else.  (You 
may need to also press form feed or eject on your printer to print the 
page).  If the CMOS battery ever runs flat, or if you install a new Y2K 
compatible clock chip, you will lose these settings and having a printed 
copy makes it easy to re-enter them.   Reset the clock ONLY.  Unless you 
know what you are doing leave everything else alone, then select the 
reboot option.   The CMOS contains critical information for the BIOS, 
and the BIOS chip has no space for extensive user friendly programming 
to limit and check your changes, so be careful.  If  you change any 
settings other than the clock and you get it wrong the computer will not 
work properly, and incorrectly changing the hard drive parameters may 
cause the hard drive to become unusable.  

Much has been written on Y2K computer clock problems.  If you are 
interested, or if the above testing shows you have a problem and you 
want to know more (including alternate ways of handling it, details on 
CMOS and BIOS upgrades), be sure to read some of the internet world wide 
web documents that I have put into text format in file Y2KINFO.TXT which 
you will find on the same directory as Payroll USA (probably C:\PAYPGMS 
)  You do not need a web browser, you can read  C:\PAYPGMS\Y2KINFO.TXT 
with any text editor or word processor or you can view or print it from 
within Payroll USA.  From the START UP MENU take

F3 READ OR PRINT DOCUMENTATION & REGISTRATION INFO
 
OR, from within the "ADD OR UPDATE EMPLOYEE INFO. / ENTER HOURS" menu 
take 

F6  Documentation, Registration Info.

Please note that printing Y2KINFO.TXT takes about 42 pages. You might 
prefer to read it on screen (which you can also do with the above 
Payroll USA choices) and if there are any portions that you particularly 
want to print use a word processor or text editor to cut and paste them 
into a new document then print that.


Order Form Survey
-----------------

17% of customers did not answer the question about which operating 
system they were using.  Of the 83% who did answer, 40% are still using 
DOS, 60% are now using Windows.   Of  100% DOS users,  37% expect to be 
switching to Windows in the next 12 months.  Of  100% Windows users,  
17% are using Windows 3.x,  61% are using Windows 95, and  22% are using 
Windows 98 (or to put it another way 83% of Windows users are now 32 
bit).   Of the Windows users, priority for a Windows version of  Payroll 
USA was 34% High, 20% Medium, 22% Low, and 24% no priority.  

34% of customers did not answer the question about which CPU was in 
their system.  Of the 66% who did answer, 48% have older 486/386/286 
CPU's,  20% have older, slower, 586/Pentiums, and 32% have newer, 
faster, 586/Pentiums.   Median number of employees is 14, 12% of 
customers have more than 1 employee file, and 12% of customers are 
network users.


Precautions (Insurance against "bugs")
--------------------------------------

I say this every year, but it bears repeating.

I have tested the above and it all seems to work fine.  However, with a 
deadline for getting the disks out for the new tax year there is always 
a chance of something being missed in the rush, and with any programming 
changes there is always a small risk of problems, so be alert and if 
anything unexplainable occurs give me a call (afternoons or evenings are 
the best times to catch me in).  Any major problems will be fixed as 
soon as possible, minor problems will be fixed next year.  As added 
insurance be sure to keep backups of your data on diskette whenever the 
program offers (always wise) and keep last years distribution disks so 
they can be re-installed temporarily if a serious bug comes up that 
takes me a few weeks to fix and re-distribute. The tax differences are 
minor enough not to really matter for a few weeks.  I am not expecting 
any problems, but in this business it doesn't hurt to take precautions - 
they cost next to nothing and can be a lifesaver if problems arise.  
People have bills to pay and food to buy, they get upset if they can't 
be paid on time so its worth taking precautions.


Christopher Anthistle,
President,
22nd. February, 1999

