Problem:
Our techie friends here want to do the following for balance initialisations:
For uploading the YTD Payroll Balances the upload date is, for example, 31 Aug 2006, but the upload date is being defaulted in Oracle to 25 Apr 2006 which is the normal payment date for the month of April. Is this correct or should the date be 5/6 April of the current tax year.
Any help would be great.

Hello Colette

Logically the upload date ought to reflect the end of the pay period of the last payroll run on the legacy system whence balances were extracted.

E.g. if your last legacy payroll was August 2006, then the upload date would reasonably be 31-Aug-2006. I seem to recall we had issues at that well-known guardian of the nation's healthcare, where one of their payrolls had (has?) an offset. We had to do some kind of monkeying about with that one - perhaps young Baz might care to comment further...

Anyways, back to the issue. The upload date supplied is really only a guide to the Initial Balance Upload process - in fact it takes a whole host of things into account before coming up with the actual effective date of the BI payroll action. For statutory balances (ie with the _ASG_TD_YTD dimension) it will more than likely end up being the end of the pay period for the first period in the tax year to which the upload date pertains. Still with me? No? OK then. For an _ASG_ITD dimension however, the date will end up being the earliest date at which the assignment is on the payroll to which the balace header relates. Which could be quite a while ago!

Whichever date the process decides to use, you should still be able to see the loaded balances as at the next period in Oracle (September 2006 in our example) by picking an employee then navigating to Assignment->Others->Balance (I think)

Edited to add:
If you look at the first page of posts in the 'Data Migration' forum, you'll see a thread entitled "CT's Handy Hints for Migrating Balances". There's an attachment on there which is probably overdue for an upgrade, but even so may give a few useful pointers.