When a payroll system reaches the end of its life, attention naturally turns to the shiny new software. The real risk sits somewhere far quieter – in the data you leave behind.
MYOB has confirmed that Ace Payroll will be decommissioned on 1 April 2027, with the final compliance update expected in March 2027. For the many New Zealand employers still running Ace, that deadline is closer than it looks – and it is only part of a much larger migration wave.
Whatever is driving your move, the question is the same: when you switch systems, what happens to your payroll history – and does it survive the journey intact?
At Paymasters, we have built dedicated data extraction and migration tools precisely because we have seen how often this goes wrong.
Your records are not yours to discard
Most migration conversations centre on the future – which platform, what it costs, how it works. Almost no one asks the more important question: what happens to the years of payroll data sitting in the system you are about to retire?
Under New Zealand law, those records are not yours to discard when you change software. Wages and time records must be kept for at least six years under section 130 of the Employment Relations Act 2000. Holiday and leave records carry the same six-year obligation under section 81 of the Holidays Act 2003. PAYE and other tax records must be retained for seven years under the Tax Administration Act 1994. All of it must remain accurate and readily accessible for inspection by a Labour Inspector or production to an employee on request.
That obligation does not pause because your software vendor switched off the server. When a product like Ace Payroll is decommissioned, you gradually lose practical access to the data itself – and “the software no longer runs” is not a defence the Employment Relations Authority will accept.
A proprietary backup is not the answer. It is only useful if you still have the software that created it. Extracted data – exported into open, readable formats – is yours forever, independent of any vendor.
Leave balances: where migrations quietly fail
Migrating payroll is not like moving a contacts list. A payroll dataset is a web of interdependent figures, and the most dangerous of them all is leave.
When you transfer to a new system, your year-to-date earnings, PAYE, KiwiSaver and student loan figures all need to continue cleanly, alongside leave balances, entitlement and anniversary dates, employee master data, and the historical pay records you are required to retain.
Leave is where it goes wrong. The Holidays Act 2003 requires annual holidays to be paid at the greater of ordinary weekly pay (OWP) or average weekly earnings (AWE), and requires public holidays, sick leave, bereavement leave and alternative holidays to be paid using relevant daily pay (RDP) or, where applicable, average daily pay (ADP). Many systems hold annual leave in hours rather than weeks – and when an employee’s work pattern changes, an hours-based balance can quietly become non-compliant, because four weeks of leave must reflect what genuinely constitutes a working week for that employee at the time the leave is taken.
Transfer that complexity at face value and you do not just inherit a data problem. You inherit a cumulative underpayment chain that compounds with every pay run – the same small, uncorrected errors behind the Holidays Act remediation cases that have cost New Zealand employers many millions of dollars. As MBIE’s own guidance makes clear, the correct treatment of leave depends on the specific facts of each employee’s working arrangements – a judgement payroll software cannot make on its own.
The three ways payroll migrations fail
In our experience, botched migrations fall into three categories:
- The data is lost. The old system is switched off, the backup is unreadable, and records that must be kept for six or seven years no longer exist in a usable form.
- The data is wrong. Balances and year-to-date figures transfer at face value, carrying forward old errors – or introducing new ones – that surface months later as underpayments or a failed leave calculation.
- The data is incomplete. Master data moves but the audit trail does not, leaving the business unable to demonstrate historical compliance if it is ever challenged.
Each of these is avoidable. None of them is avoided by accident.
Our data extraction and migration service
We have developed a data extraction tool for MYOB Ace Payroll – built to pull your historical and current payroll data out of Ace into clean, structured, readable formats ahead of its 2027 decommissioning. We have also built migration tools for MYOB IMS Payroll and MYOB EXO, and we provide data extraction for businesses moving between payroll systems generally – whatever you are moving from, and whatever you are moving to.
Our service is deliberately platform-agnostic. We are not selling you a particular piece of software. We are a payroll outsourcing and compliance specialist, and our job is to make sure your data arrives complete, and accurate – with a clean copy of your historical records preserved for the retention periods the law requires.
What we extract and prepare typically includes a durable archive of historical pay records, current employee master data, year-to-date tax and KiwiSaver figures, and leave balances. That is the difference between a data dump and a compliant migration, and it reflects our “Touch It Once” philosophy: get it right the first time, because errors compound.
How it works
We start by confirming what system you are leaving, what you are moving to, and your timeframe. We then extract your data using our purpose-built tools, review and reconcile the figures – with particular attention to leave balances and year-to-date totals – and flag anything that needs a compliance judgement before it moves.
From there we prepare your data for loading into the new system, or, if you would prefer to step out of payroll altogether, take it on as your outsourced provider. Either way, you receive a clean, durable copy of your historical records to satisfy your retention obligations, independent of any software vendor.
Why Paymasters
For thirty years we have processed New Zealand payroll with a single, non-negotiable filter: legal compliance first. That record includes zero negative Labour Inspectorate reviews and zero client penalties across three decades – not a marketing claim, but the natural outcome of the way we work every day.
We understand payroll data because we live in it. When your data passes through our hands during a migration, it passes through people who know exactly what a compliant leave balance looks like – and what a future liability looks like before it becomes one. A migration is a once-in-many-years event for your business. Getting payroll data right is what we do every single day.
Move early, not in the 2027 rush
If you run MYOB Ace Payroll, the worst time to migrate is the last possible moment, when every other Ace user in the country is doing the same thing. The best time is now, while there is room to extract, reconcile and verify without pressure. And if you are moving off MYOB IMS, MYOB EXO or any other system, the principle holds: your data is a legal asset – treat it like one.
To find out how we can extract and protect your payroll data ahead of a migration, contact us for a confidential discussion. You can also read more on our blog.
Sources and further reading
- MYOB Community – confirmation that Ace Payroll is scheduled for decommissioning on 1 April 2027: community.myob.com
- Holidays Act 2003, section 81 (holiday and leave record – six-year retention): legislation.govt.nz
- Employment New Zealand – Record-keeping obligations: employment.govt.nz
- Business.govt.nz – Record keeping (minimum six years): business.govt.nz
This article is general information, not legal advice. For advice on your specific payroll migration and compliance obligations, please contact us.