If you want to go straight to plan B, yes, we can use a a Form Rule to save the field
[emp#-yyyy-q by formula] field to the field
[emp#-yyyy-q] which is a text field.
Then that can be backed up with an Automation to run when the record is saved and somehow the Form rule fails or else the edits were done in Grid Edit, and that can be backed up with a daily Automation to run a saved table to table import to detect any records where the formula field is not equal to the text version and copy the record into themselves by firing the saved table to tabla import.
The issue with relying n the Automation, can be a performance hit to the app. If you have a large # of record, I have found that the the Automation to have a saved record trigger an update of itself is not so efficient as basically the system needs to scan all records looking for the correct [Record ID#] to edit. For many apps performance is not a concern, but I did get burned on this once in an app design and while there was not a better way to do this, I did realize that the user experience with an app that was already performance challenged was made worse by that kind of Automation.