Here is a scenario I sometimes get calls about right after a new tax update releases. You go to do payroll and get an error message that goes something like “Could not find 401K EE 12 single calculation”. Or in version 2013 it has been updated to say “The following formula listed on the Employee record does not exist in Payroll Formulas … To correct this, select File, Payroll Formulas, User-Maintainted and add this formula.” But when you try to open the User-Maintained Tax Table you get an error message that says “A Managed exception was caught. The error is ‘Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.”
This error means that there is a problem in the user-maintained tax table. It may mean that the file was damaged. But if the error appeared after a tax update was installed there is another likely explanation.
The User-Maintained tax table is stored in the folder with your company’s data. The Sage-Maintained tax table is stored in you data path. Both files are named taxtable.dat. If your data is in the folder C:\Sage\Peachtree\Company\myname, then your data path is C:\Sage\Peachtree\Company. It’s called the data path because each company’s data folder will be stored here. During the installation of the tax update you are asked for your data path. If you direct it to C:\Sage\Peachtree\Company\myname instead of C:\Sage\Peachtree\Company the taxtable.dat that was your user maintained tax table will be replaced by the taxtable.dat that was supposed to become the new Sage-Maintained tax table.
To fix the error you need to restore a backup of the taxtable.dat that is your user-maintained tax table. You could restore a your whole Sage 50 company, but then you would have to re-enter everything that had been entered since that backup was made. Here are two ways you can restore just your user-maintained tax table.
- If you make backups of your data outside of Sage 50/Peachtree, you can restore just the taxtable.dat that is in your company’s folder. If you don’t know which folder your company is in, open your company in Sage 50, go to the Maintain menu and choose Company Information. The Directory field displays your company’s location.
- If you made a backup in Sage 50/Peachtree, go to the Windows Start button and choose Computer or My Computer, depending on your version of Windows. Then browse to the location where you saved the backup. Right click on the backup file and choose Rename. Change the extension from .PTB to .ZIP. Depending on your settings in Windows, you may not see the .PTB extension. In that case, add a quotation mark at the beginning of the file name and .ZIP” (including the period and quotation mark) to the end of the file name. So if the file name was My Company-121512 you need to make it “My Company-121512.ZIP” including the quotation marks. When you press Enter to save your change, the quotation marks, and possibly the .ZIP will go away. Now double click on the file to open it. It should open up just as of you had opened a folder. Find TAXTABLE.DAT, right click on it and choose Copy. Then navigate to your company’s folder and paste the file into this folder. When prompted, choose to replace the existing taxtable.dat file. If you want to be cautious, you could rename that file to taxtable.old before pasting the new file so that you can undo your changes if you need to.
It’s also a good idea to re-install the last tax update to be sure your Sage-Maintained tax tables are properly updated. With Sage 50 /Peachtree closed, go the the folder that is your data path (C:\Sage\Peachtree\Company in the example above), double click on the Updates folder, find the most recent tax update and double click to install it. Be sure to give it the correct data location this time.
DO NOT try restoring individual data files other than taxtable.dat. Most of them contain links to data in many other files, so if you don’t restore the whole company you will usually create a worse problem than you started with.
