As Dynamics GP Sunsets, ResNav Shows Employers How to Migrate Payroll

As Dynamics GP heads toward end-of-life, ResNav says the biggest migration risk is what happens to years of payroll & HR records and documents left behind.

ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, August 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — . ResNav, the HR and payroll history expert for data and documents, is urging organizations still running payroll on Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) to treat historical record preservation as its own workstream ahead of Microsoft’s mainstream support cutoff on December 31, 2029, rather than leaving it to chance during a system migration.

Microsoft stopped selling new Dynamics GP licenses earlier this year. Mainstream support is scheduled to end December 31, 2029, and discretionary security patches will continue at most through April 30, 2031. Existing GP environments will keep running past those dates, but without tax table updates, regulatory changes, or vendor support. Organizations on older GP versions governed by Microsoft’s Fixed Lifecycle Policy may find their effective deadline is already sooner than 2029.

New payroll and HCM platforms typically bring forward current data only, which means the historical payroll and HR records sitting inside GP need their own migration plan, separate from the new system implementation.

“Most of the calls we get are from employers who didn’t realize they would lose information in a technology transition—most assume all their historical information will port over and that’s rarely the case,” said Gabe Bell, VP of Sales at ResNav. “Unfortunately, we frequently hear from organizations who have lost their legacy data and want to know if there’s a way to recover it once it’s gone—and there is not. With the legacy GP environment being decommissioned, organizations need to be planning ahead. The fix is cheap and simple if you plan it before go-live. It’s expensive and stressful if you’re reconstructing it after the fact.”

The retirement of Dynamics GP payroll puts Microsoft Dynamics customers on notice, and the compliance stakes for skipping a historical data plan are rising. DOL wage-and-hour investigations increasingly reach further back than employers expect. Several states require employers to keep payroll and HR records well beyond what most organizations assume. Litigation, unemployment claims, and pay disagreements routinely emerge years after a system transition, often outside the window anyone planned for. Keeping an old GP instance alive indefinitely, to answer the occasional records request, adds ongoing licensing, hosting, and IT costs with no end date.

ResNav treats payroll and HR history as more than a data extraction problem. Migrating rows of payroll data is only part of the picture. The source documents, including pay stubs, tax forms, and personnel files, carry their own retention and audit requirements, and they are the piece most migration plans overlook entirely.

“Data without the supporting documents doesn’t hold up in an audit the way people assume it will,” Bell added. “An auditor often wants the document behind the record, and increasingly, the change history behind both. That’s the piece we see left behind most often, and it’s frequently what auditors and investigators ask for first. That gap between a data export and a true historical archive is where we specialize.”
Organizations migrating off GP typically face a choice between paying to keep a legacy environment running, exporting to static files that are hard to search, or migrating historical data and documents into a dedicated archive. ResNav recommends the archive approach for most organizations, regardless of which new payroll or HCM platform they select, whether Dynamics 365 Business Central or a cloud HCM platform such as ADP, UKG, Workday, Paycor, or Paylocity.

For the full Dynamics GP payroll end-of-life timeline, see ResNav’s related resource, Dynamics GP Payroll Is Being Retired: What’s Next? (https://resnav.com/resource/dynamics-gp-great-plains-payroll-is-being-retired-whats-next/).

Liz Everson
ResNav Solutions
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