This chapter provides an overview of Oracle Labor Distribution. The topics include:
Oracle Labor Distribution provides a flexible approach to the following:
Scheduling employees
Encumbering labor costs
Distributing labor costs
Labor Distribution enables organizations to schedule, create, correct, and certify labor cost distribution without a timecard system.
Labor Distribution is fully integrated with Oracle Human Resources, Oracle Payroll, Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Projects, and Oracle Grants Accounting.
Labor Distribution provides organizations and institutions with the ability to perform the following:
Create and update employee labor schedules
Distribute pay amounts
Encumber salary and wages
Provide interfaces to non-Oracle payroll and timecard systems
Adjust posted labor distribution
Create and approve or certify employee effort reports
Route effort reports for review and approval or certification
Route distribution adjustment for approval
Labor Distribution supports OMB A-21 Effort Reporting for institutions receiving federal research funding.
Labor Distribution includes the following features:
Integration of Labor Distribution with Oracle Public Sector Budgeting
Integration of Labor Distribution with Position Control in Human Resource Management Systems
Labor Distribution enables managers or effort report initiators to create labor schedules for each employee assignment. These labor schedules are the basis for payroll labor distribution and encumbrances.
Each labor schedule provides a set of charging instructions that reflects the percentage of earnings to be charged to General Ledger, Grants Accounting, or Projects. You enter charging instructions on a schedule line that identifies the start and end date and the percent of effort to be charged to one of the target accounts. You can enter additional information about schedules and funding sources in a flexfield. Each employee assignment can have unlimited labor schedule lines. You can modify labor schedules at any time to reflect changes in charging instructions.
To simplify schedule line data entry, Labor Distribution includes default labor schedules for specific organizations and a user-defined schedule hierarchy. You can create default schedules for a department, and charge the pay for all the employees in that department on the basis of the default schedule.
Schedule hierarchies enable you to create schedules at the employee assignment, element group, and element levels. Labor Distribution uses the schedule hierarchy to determine which labor schedule to use.
Labor Distribution enables you to distribute all types of pay to General Ledger accounts, Grants Accounting awards, and Projects based on the labor schedules you define for the employee assignment. The application calculates distribution amounts on a daily basis.
Labor Distribution integrates with other non-Oracle payroll systems by providing open interfaces to import non-Oracle payroll data and charging instructions that time management systems create. You write non-Oracle payroll to an interface table. You can edit payroll entries before distributing them to their target accounts. You can use and adjust these distributions in effort reporting.
Labor Distribution enables you to adjust posted payroll distributions. If you adjust distributions, then you must reverse them, and create new distributions. You must provide an explanation for adjustments.
Adjustments are subject to appropriate security approvals. The Workflow routes adjustment approvals to appropriate personnel. The adjustments are posted to General Ledger, Grants Accounting, or Projects. After the appropriate person approves the distribution adjustments and the application processes the adjustments, you can generate new effort reports and approve them to certify the correct effort distribution for the effort report period.
Effort reporting ensures accurate disbursement of labor charges. Effort reports summarize the labor distributions made over a period of time. Certification of the effort report by an employee or supervisor verifies distributions made against actual work performed. The Oracle Approvals Management Workflow routes effort reports to approvers for review, and approval depending on how you configure the workflow.
You can customize effort reports to meet your institution's or organization's requirements. You can do all this using the Effort Report Template Pages.
In a typical effort report process flow, administrators set up the effort report templates, initiators create the effort report, approvers approve the effort report, and the final recipients receive the consolidated and approved effort reports to print and archive.
Labor Distribution encumbers salary and wages and posts the encumbrances to General Ledger and Grants Accounting. By reserving funds from a budget for expenses committed yet not expended, you can see what funds are available and plan accordingly. As payroll charges are distributed to the target accounts, you can liquidate encumbrances, and apply the burden rate of the original encumbrance line to the liquidated encumbrance line.
You can select employee assignments for encumbrance by selecting the payrolls to encumber, thereby including all assignments in the selected payroll. You can encumber different charging instructions for differing time periods based on a 100% time period definition for each organization. Labor Distribution creates encumbrance lines for the future based on the employee's organization and other setup information.
Auto-population of expenditure type and natural account automatically populates expenditure type and natural account fields during labor distribution. You can define and modify the auto-fill mapping rules using a wide range of parameters.
A series of reconciliation reports enable you to view the step-by-step distribution of labor costs. Totals for each step are compared with totals from the previous step to verify accurate labor cost distribution.
Scheduling and Distribution reports show details about labor schedules, default labor schedules, default accounts, suspense accounts, and actual distributions.
Multiple Organizations enable you to define multiple organizations and the relationship among them in a single installation and to secure access to data so that you can access only the information that is relevant to them.
Without multiple organizations, organizations with multiple business entities must install Labor Distribution multiple times within the same database. Multiple Organizations supports a single installation with any number of different logical business entities.
Summarize and Transfer Adjustments enable you to approve defined distribution adjustment batches without automatically transferring approved distribution adjustments to General Ledger, Grants Accounting, or Projects.
Summarize and Transfer Adjustments provide the following benefits:
Approve distribution adjustment batch without automatically running the Summarize and Transfer Adjustments process
Summarize and transfer approved distribution batches at one time
Redefine distribution adjustments for rejected adjustments during the Summarize and Transfer Adjustments process
Rolling back Labor Distribution processes enables you to correct errors after running each process. This reduces the requirement to create distribution adjustments.
Rollback of Labor Distribution processes provide you the following benefits:
Roll back of Oracle and Non-Oracle Payroll Import processes enable you to re-import the same payroll
Rollback of Create Distribution Lines enable you to recreate distribution lines for lines that are not summarized and transferred.
If a system crash or abnormal termination due to database failures occurs during certain processes, Labor Distribution provides easy error recovery. In most cases, you need only restart the failed process (after you have fixed the error).
All restart and recovery processes used in previous releases have been obsoleted. When you experience an error condition:
Correct the issue that caused the failure (if necessary)
Rerun the process that failed. The failed processes will skip the phases that had completed successfully and will continue with the pending phase.
To recover the Summarize and Transfer Distribution Adjustments process, run its corresponding restart process.
Labor Distribution is integrated with Workflow to facilitate the approval processes in effort reporting and distribution adjustments. Workflow automates the approval processes.
Labor Distribution uses standard Oracle Applications security. Access and approvals are controlled through responsibilities that you create and assign to users.
The integration of Labor Distribution with Public Sector Budgeting enables you as a Public Sector Budgeting user to access a labor schedule from Labor Distribution instead of Oracle Human Resource Management Systems. This integration includes the following features:
Ability to bring salary distribution lines information into Public Sector Budgeting from Labor Distribution
Ability to facilitate successful completion of budget worksheet with position budgeting
For detailed information on the integration of Public Sector Budgeting with Labor Distribution, see Using HRMS Budgeting, Oracle HRMS Enterprise and Workforce Management Guide.
Integration between Labor Distribution and Position Control functionality in Oracle Public Sector HRMS ensures the following:
Position encumbrances created by Position Control are removed from Grants Accounting before Labor Distribution sends payroll encumbrances for employee assignments
Ability to manage the budgets, encumbrances, and distribution of costs associated with positions and employee assignments
For detailed information on Position Control, see Enterprise Modeling, Oracle HRMS Enterprise and Workforce Management Guide