Understanding Absence Management

Absence Management enables organizations to automate the processes for planning and compensating paid time off for a multinational workforce. It combines employee and manager capabilities and tracks all absences in a single application. Absence Management contains built in integration to PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll for North America, either directly or through PeopleSoft Enterprise Time and Labor, and to third-party payroll solutions using PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll Interface. This chapter is the starting point for learning about Absence Management tasks and features.

Common Elements, Absence Features, and Integration

This chapter contains a review of terms used in this chapter, presents important absence management concepts and features, and discusses the integration to your payroll system.

Common Elements Used in This Chapter

Absence Management Features

This overview of Absence Management features includes the following topics:

• Schedules.

• Entitlements.

• Absence types and reasons.

• Takes.

• Absence entry, approvals, and self service features.

• Integrations.

Schedules

Tracking the time that payees are absent from work is critical to producing an accurate payroll. You need to know when payees are out sick, on vacation, or absent for any other reason and whether to pay them for this time. Schedules define workplace attendance expectations for groups of employees, and include definition of the workdays, scheduling units, and holidays. This information is important to the absence process because it tells the system whether a reported absence occurred during a scheduled work time. Absences during scheduled work periods may be paid if they meet your organization’s absence rules.

Absence Entitlements

Absence entitlement elements define how much paid time off your organization gives payees for various kinds of absences. They also specify the entitlement period, the calculation frequency, and any automatic adjustments to make to entitlement balances. For example, you might set up a vacation entitlement element that gives payees 15 days of paid vacation each year. Also, you might specify that payees are compensated for half of any vacation days that are unused by April 1 of the following year. Entitlement can be granted for each absence or at the frequency that you specify.

For each absence entitlement element that you create, you indicate whether entitlement should accrue for each absence (for example, 40 days for each illness) or at the frequency that you specify (for example, 2 sick days per month). Absence-based entitlement is resolved when you run the Take process after an absence occurs; frequency-based entitlement is resolved when you run the Entitlement process. With frequency-based entitlement, you can use generation control to limit the conditions under which entitlement is resolved. For example, you can limit resolution to active payees only. Using automatic adjustments, you can specify what happens to a payee's frequency-based entitlement balance when certain conditions are met; for example, when a payee is terminated or when a certain date is reached. Payees can be compensated for all or part of the unused entitlement, or they can lose all or part of the unused entitlement. You use a generation control element to define the conditions under which the adjustment is made.

Absence Takes

Absence take elements define your rules for allowing paid time off. They define which kinds of absences are valid and the requirements that must be met before entitlement can be used. For example, a vacation take rule may require that payees be employed three months before using vacation entitlement. You can link each take element to one or more entitlement elements so that the system can calculate the number of paid and unpaid units and update the entitlement balances. If you link to more than one entitlement element, you specify the order in which the elements are to be used. When an absence occurs, the system takes from the first entitlement (until it is depleted) before taking from the next entitlement.

Absence Types and Reasons

Absence types define the broad categories of absences you want to track, such as illness, vacation, or maternity leave. Within each absence type, you can create a set of absence reasons that further classify absences. For example, if you create an absence type called illness, you may want to set up reasons such as cold, flu, stress, and so on.

You create absence types to describe the categories of absences that are relevant to your organization such as illness, vacation, personal, or work injury. Within each type, you can define codes that further describe the reason for the absence; for example, flu or back problems. The type and reason that are associated with an absence event populate system elements that you can use in absence formulas.

Absence Entry, Approval, and Self Service Features

Depending on how you set up the approvals framework, self service features may be available to employees and managers to enter, review, and, in the case of managers, approve absence transactions. Additionally, payroll or absence administrators can enter, modify, review and approve absence transactions through Absence Management pages.

• Absence entry.

  To record actual absences into the system, users select the take element that identifies the absence and enter the dates of the absence. An absence reason can also be entered to further identify the cause of the absence (if you have defined absence reasons codes). Depending on your take rules, you can require online approval of absence entries before processing. If online forecasting is required for a take element, the system issues a warning when users try to save absence entries without first running the online forecasting process. Payees and managers can enter requests for absences through a web browser and view requests.

  Users can enter full or partial day absences so that when a payee is out for the same number of hours during each day of an absence event, the user enters the hours only once or selects the Half Day check box, if appropriate.

  Self service users can enter information in as many as 4 configurable fields when they enter absence events. This information updates the daily data when you run the Take process and can be available to your absence formulas. If you use this feature, we recommend that you provide users with guidelines for the types of data that they can enter.

  Note. If you define rules for self-service absence transactions, employees, managers, or both can use the self service pages to enter requests for absences. You can also define rules for approving self-service absence requests. Requests entered through the self service pages are treated as actual absences once they are approved.

• Absence entitlement balance forecasting.

  You can require the use of online absence entitlement balance forecasting during absence entry, or make its use optional. Managers can approve requests for absences and forecast absence entitlement balances as of a particular date. With forecasting, a user enters actual or planned absence events and launches an online process that processes future periods of time, starting with the last finalized calendar. It can return values for balances and other items that you define. You might use this feature, for example, to determine whether a payee has or will have enough entitlement to cover an absence.

• Balance inquiry.

  Use this feature to display a payee’s current entitlement balance. The online process displays the current entitlement balance and can be used to project entitlement for a take element as of the date that you specify.

• Delegate absence self service transactions.

  Delegation is when a person authorizes another to serve as his or her representative for a particular task of responsibility. Users can authorize other users to perform managerial tasks on their behalf by delegating authority to initiate or approve managerial transactions.

Integration

Absence Management has functionality that enables you to enter and track absence information. However, that information must be available to your payroll system in order to process earnings and deductions related to absences. To accomplish this, Absence Management integrates with the following PeopleSoft applications:

• Payroll for North America, either directly or through Time and Labor.

• Payroll Interface, for customers that use a third-party payroll system.

Integration to Payroll for North America

To enable direct integration between Absence Management and Payroll for North America, Absence Management delivers the ability to export computed absence results (by employee and pay period) for actual payment. Only a minimum amount of setup is required to map absence payment concepts to an existing Payroll for North America system.

For customers who use both Payroll for North America and Time and Labor, the functionality in Absence Management includes the ability to enter absences or view absence balances in Time and Labor on the Timesheet page Time and Labor converts this data into payable time and adds sequence and reference numbers for eventual cost distribution. This integration eliminates double entry and custom interfaces.

Integration to Payroll Interface

To enable the integration between Absence Management and third-party payrolls, Absence Management enables you to export computed absence results (by employee and pay period) for actual payment. Only a minimum amount of setup is required to map absence payment concepts to an existing payroll interface process.