Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Changes to TRC Setup

The setup component in Time and Labor that has changed significantly in 9.1 (more in terms of layout and additional features and less of fundamental data structure changes to the TL_TRC_TBL) is the TRC Setup page. Considering that the TRC is the fundamental building block of the module, it is imperative for us to understand the details of the change. The salient enhancements to the TRC Setup is as below:

• A completely new page called 'Approvals and Comments' has added to the component. This is in conjunction with the introduction of the Approval Workflow Engine (AWE) framework in Time and Labor. The introduction of AWE is a major change and changes the way approvals are handled in Time and Labor. Earlier, the field called 'Approval Option' (where one could choose 'Reported Time', 'Payable Time' or 'None') controlled the way in which the TRC had to be approved. But this field has been taken off the page in 9.1 and a completely new page has been provided to fill in the AWE details for each TRC. This setup is similar to the familiar 'Country Take' setup in Absence Management, where we attach an Approval Process Id to each Absence Take that is exposed in Self Service.
• The fields that were present in the page called 'TRC2' in prior versions have been moved over to the first page of the definition. These fields include Effect on Comp/Leave, Hours Represent, Interface options etc.
• The tabs have been renamed to Definition and Approval and Comments from TRC1 and TRC2.

The new pages are shown below:


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The major change as seen above is the introduction of the approval framewok settings. The adoption of AWE in Time and Labor has far fetched consequences, especially when one considers security and integration with Absence Management (it will now be imperative to synch up T&L security, Approval framework and Absence Approval framework). I am studying the technical architecture of the approval framework in T&L and will post about it in detail soon.

What is the purpose of a TRC Category in Time and Labor?

Peoplesoft introduced a new definition in Time and Labor 8.9 called Time Reporting Category. A new field was introduced in the TRC Setup page, where a TRC could be mapped to a category. A TRC Category can be used to group functionally similar TRCs together. For example, if your organisation uses three different over time TRCs like OT1, OT2 and OT3 for different rates of overtime - you could create a TRC Category called Over Time and link the above three TRCs to this.
But where exactly is this new definition used?

The primary purpose of this new definition is to populate the newly introduced grid called 'Reported Hours Summary' in the Timesheet page. This grid gives the summary based on the TRC Category reported in the timesheet. This is specifically useful as a single snapshot view of the summary of various categories of time reported in a period. For example, suppose there are three TRC Categories like Regular, Overtime and Absence. In a week an employee has reported 4 hours of Regular time on three days, 2 hours of OT1 TRC on one day, 2 hours of OT2 TRC on one day, 8 hours of Sick Leave on one day and 3 hours of Bereavement Leave on one day. When this is summarised based on the TRC Categories - the viewer very clearly gets the picture that the employee reported a total of 12 hours of Regular Time, 4 hours of Over Time and 11 hours of Absence in the week.

Another potential use of the TRC Category definition is in reports to group TRCs together. Reports based on the TRCs reported, like overtime reports are very common in any implementation. In this case, it will be useful to create a single TRC Category called Over Time and link all the Over Time TRCs to that category and later use the category in the report rather than hard coding the TRC names.

You will also notice that this new definition has a mention in the Time and Labor installation page also, where we can control whether it should appear in the timesheet page. Even though its a very small functionality enhancement, I will advice any implementation that has more than 10 TRCs, to consider the use of well segmented, logical TRC Categories.