Absence Leakage Decision Chart

Praveen was visibly frustrated, well not without reason, as the lead Absence Management consultant he was bombarded with multiple calls from the business team - most of them talking about the same issue of users having reported absences but the same not getting paid out in payroll. These issues were serious because it affected the pay of the employees and had to be investigated on priority and it took a good half day to investigate, document and communicate the fix to the users (even though he was an expert in the module!). Couple of months into this routine, Praveen realised that better user training and tools could help HR users to troubleshoot this issue at the first level itself and he decided to prepare a decision chart for the same.
Praveen had long realised that Peoplesoft absence management was a complex module for business users to comprehend and better tools and charts were required to simplify navigation through the module. He conceptualised a simple seven step process to help users identify where the booked absence went missing. The below presentation details the decision chart prepared by Praveen:

Peoplesoft Absence Leakage Decision Chart

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As a matter of fact, not even a single call came to the IT team regarding missing absences after introducing this tool and Praveen has been smiling since then!!
Well, even today most customers and users are trying hard to wade through the issues and complexities presented by Peoplesoft Absence Management and does not have any tool or dashboard to see what is actually being paid out and whether any payroll over or underpayments are being made. If you feel you fall under this category of customers and would want better auditing and dashboards to track your Peoplesoft Time and Attendance and Payroll systems, it is time to get in touch with us!

Peoplesoft 9.1 - Time and Labor: Viewing Unprocessed Time

Oracle has strategically combined Time and Labor, Absence Management, NA Payroll and Payroll Interface into a category called 'Time and Pay' modules (interesting that Global Payroll has been maintained outside this classification!). One of the thrust areas of 9.0 as well as 9.1 has been about improving the integration and audit around these modules. Oracle took a visionary step in integrating absence self service into Time and Labor in 9.0, which I reckon is singularly the most important and useful feature upgrade from a T&L perspective after the changes to the schedule definition architecture in 8.9. For a shop that runs Absence Management, Time and Labor and Payroll for North America, the biggest challenge is to reconcile the interconnected data between the three modules - I've seen major glitches in the integration between Absence Management and Time and Labor in 8.9, which invariably leads to data inconsistency between the three modules and worse, has a negative impact in terms on Payroll compliance. While I expect much of the loose ends to be tied with the enhanced integration of Absence Management and T&L in 9.0 and above, it was really heartening to note that Oracle has provided two new pages to review unprocessed reported and payable time in 9.1. I am sure my folks in the payroll team would love that - to see which all rows did not get over to Payroll from Payable time and to see the rows in reported time not processed by Time Admin (it's not great drooling into PS Query reports all the time!).

The new pages can be found under the following navigation:
Time and Labor --> View Time --> View Unprocessed Time.

The page to view unprocessed payable time is given below:

On the flip side - I am slightly let down by the fact that Oracle did not come out with more delivered reports in 9.1 - we are still stuck with the same old Time Card, Scheduled Hours, Payable Status and TCD Usage reports. Any area related to Payroll requires extensive reporting and auditing and it would be great for Oracle to come out with something like a Payroll dashboard that would integrate data between AM, T&L and NA Payroll. The job to audit the data consistency between these three modules is not straight forward and easy, while it is critical for business to get the numbers spot on - wouldn't it be wonderful to have an off the shelf suite to audit the entire payroll data and certify that what is being paid out is the correct amount? I would love to see that!

Heard of the TL_XREF_TBL??

True to the Pareto Principle, 80% or more of the work in any Peoplesoft module can be done by knowing just 20% (or far lesser) of the tables in the system. But it's real exciting to explore and look at the rest of the infrequently used tables as most of them will have a very specific purpose which might come to light only under certain rare occassions. One such table is TL_XREF_TBL.

Where is it used?
The XREF table plays a critical part in the integration of Time and Labor and North American Payroll. When Payable Time is loaded from the TL_PAYABLE_TIME table to the paysheets in North American Payroll, the load program consolidates payable time entries before sending to NA Payroll. Consolidation means that the quantity for each TRC is summed up and a single entry with the aggregate quantity is sent to NA Payroll for each TRC under the period in question. During this process, the system assigns a cross reference number (XREF_NUM) to all the consolidated entries of a single TRC. The TL_XREF_TBL stores the XREF_NUM corresponding to each sequence number on the payable time table. The NA Payroll table PS_PAY_OTH_EARNS also contains a filed called XREF_NUM which can be used to find out the pay line entries corresponding to the spefic data that came from time and labor.

What is the practical utility of the table?
For most parts the XREF table is a background table which a developer may never need to use. But it will be very useful to audit the data flow between Time and Labor and N A Payroll. I have used this in scenarios where customers have reported issues with payable time data not coming over to payroll. In this case, the link between payable time entries and paysheet entries can be drawn to the minutest detail using the XREF_NUM.