Time and Labor - Absence Management Integration in HRMS 8.9

Its been real long since I've been able to post here! Thanks to the internet security at work!! Thought of writing down my experiences with integrating T&L with Absence Management in 8.9. This is one real exciting area in Time and Labor with more and more customers going in for Absence Management and T&L rollouts in the same implementation. From a business perspective, one cannot really see T&L and AM as different entities, though both have their own unique functions, they (and more so T&L) need to be tightly integrated and share data for meaningful business processing. Let's look at some scenarios where we need the integration:

> Payroll needs both reported time as well as absence data. Depending on the Pay System, T&L and AM data has to be collated for this purpose.

> Users would like to see/report time as well as absence on the same screen (this is one of the major enhancements to T&L in 9.0 with the feature to report/view absence data on the Timesheet. I think its a wonderful feature and a long awaited one).

> A number of T&L rules are dependent on Absence data (for example, don't apply certain rules if the employee was absent on a particular day).

Now, let's explore the integration of these two modules (the discussion is specific to 8.9, I know its a bit anachronistic, but I hope it will be useful to people still on this version!). The integration path varies depending upon the payroll system used. There are two separate processes - one for use if the Pay System is GP and the other if the pay system in NA Payroll (note that there is no delivered integration method if the Pay System is Payroll Interface). What both these processes do is to take absence data and put it into the reported time table. Then what is the difference between these two processes?
The NA Payroll process can be run only after an Absence Run has been finalised and takes data from the GP Positive Input table (GP_PI_GEN_DATA). This ensures that we have the rightly calculated data coming over to T&L. But, for a lot of users this is a major disadvantage of the process, for you cannot view absence data on Time and Labor before an Absence Calendar is finalised!
But, the case is different with the GP integration process. This takes data from a work table (GP_ABS_EVT_WRK) which is populated after a manager approves/deletes/changes absence requests. This means, that Absence data is available to T&L even before the Absence Run is started. But, this comes with a major disadvantage. The absence data that comes to T&L may not be the correct finalised absence data. In one sense its alright if GP is used as the payroll product. Things get murky if one is using a third party payroll system. In this case, the absence data in the payable time table of T&L might be incorrect as the data has come over before the Absence Run has taken place.
This is a major drawback of the current integration and every 8.9 implementation that looks to integrate AM and T&L need to keep this in mind.
I would be interested to know the ways people have worked around integrating T&L and AM with a third party payroll.

Post Note: How to identify the data that has come from Absence Management in T&L?
Query TL_RPTD_TIME for a RT_SOURCE = 'AM'.