1. Figure out the actual vacation pay payable in the real world.

2. If the actual vacation pay payable in the real world equals the total vacation pay payable according to the payroll module, then just do a general journal entry to force your vacatio pay general ledger account to the correct balance.  You will be warned that you are trying to post to a linked account, but that is OK this once.

3.  If the actual vacation pay payable is different from the total vacation pay payable according to the payroll module, you will need to figure out which employee(s) have errors in the payroll module.  Print an employee summary report for all employees - including inactive.  (Or, if there are lots of employees, open up the report and then use the export-to-Excel button to get a much shorter report!)  You may need to re-activate old employees and fix their vacation pay payable.  Note that you do NOT want to do anything that will affect their T4 slips, so do NOT just 'pay out' the vacation pay, but rather use negative holiday pay accruals to fix the problem.

Thanks. The actual vacation pay payable is different from the total according to the payroll module. I did a summary report for all employees, but there's an internal setting somewhere that limited the report to 2 prior years. Since the error was at least 5 years ago, this didn't help identify which employee account is in error. Do you know if there's a setting I can change to shift the report parameters further back in time? 

Hi KMD1966:

You may want to open the Payroll employee records of Sage 50 and browse through the employees to see which employees have any accrued vacation in the income folder of the payroll ledger or employee record. You will probably have to look under the terminated employees.

Hope this helps!

Thanks! I'll try that and see what I come up with. 

Here's another way to get a list of the vacation payable balances according to the payables module:

1. Do an employee summary report for the current year, including inactive employees:

This creates  a really annoying report with one full page per employee, and the vacation owed balance buried somewhere in the middle column of figures.  However, if you click on the 'open in Excel' button at the top of the annoying report, you get an Excel sheet with one line per employee:

You can just ignore/hide/delete all the (many) columns that don't have to do with vacation pay.  In my data set, columns L, M, and N are vacation pay settings for each employee, and column BU is the vacation owed balance:

That looks like it should populate with the information I need. I won't be back to this client for another week or so, and I'll try it then. Thanks. :)