Understanding Global Payroll

This chapter discusses:

Click to jump to parent topicGlobal Payroll Features

Global Payroll gives you control over all aspects of your payroll operation in a multinational environment. It supports multiple countries, languages, and currencies, and European Monetary Unit (EMU) processing requirements.

The core application handles payroll and absence processing and enables you to fine-tune the design of your payroll system. Using a browser environment, PeopleTools, and a rules-based system, you can configure your payroll system online without writing or changing source code, thus reducing installation time and costs. Global Payroll adjusts to hardware and software upgrades without altering your view of the system. Your workstations can run on virtually any operating system, because the user interface is browser-based and operating-system-independent.

Because payroll runs are typically large and time-consuming, the system calculates only where needed. Rather than processing 10,000 workers during each run, it processes only 20 or 100 — whatever the number of adjustments you've made to the run. You can run the payroll process over and over again, without spending hours—or days—calculating payroll after payroll.

Click to jump to parent topicElements

Global Payroll contains no application-specific rules or code. Using pay items called elements, you build rules that determine what payroll or absence components are calculated, on a payee-by-payee basis, during batch processing.

Elements provide system flexibility. With no payroll rules in the code line, you don't depend on programmers to make system changes. Your functional team members can do most of the maintenance and changes. The system provides utilities to process the entered rules and operates using the element names you've applied.

You'll name and define many elements in Global Payroll, including:

With a few exceptions, an element resolves to a value. For instance, you might create an element called SALARY that resolves to a specific number; for example, 50,000 for a particular payee and 67,000 for another.

Once an element is defined, you can associate it with a specific country or with all countries. You can even group elements by industry, category, or up to five database fields that are user-defined. The ability to group elements in various ways adds further flexibility to your payroll system.

You can set up elements in any language that is supported by PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft provides translations for all delivered system elements, and you can define the elements you create in more than one language. An organization building a payroll might use some or all of these languages. In short, each organization has the opportunity to create a payroll specific to its needs—in any or all languages—without having to rework the internal processes of the system.

Important! Defining elements is an important concept of Global Payroll because you must name, define, and sequence every aspect of the payroll process before the system can successfully complete a payroll.

Click to jump to parent topicPayroll Rules

Payroll rules are a set of elements that are used to:

A rule usually uses one or more elements. Payroll rules, combined with filtering mechanisms such as eligibility groups, generation control, payee assignments/overrides, and supporting element overrides, determine which elements are calculated. After defining your payroll rules, you add them to the main control feature, called a process list. The process list determines which elements are processed during the pay run, and the order of processing.

Each country defines its own Global Payroll rules.

Note. While the core application delivers a set of best-practice rules that can be used for any country, it does not include rules that are specific to a particular country. Country-specific rules are typically delivered as part of the country extensions. Some customers buy only the core application and develop new country-specific rules by modifying the delivered best-practice rules or creating new ones.

Click to jump to parent topicPayroll Processing

Once Global Payroll is set up to meet your organization's needs, processing your payroll involves:

The first step is determining which payees to process. Once payees are selected, you run the payroll calculation process. If a few payees have had changes to their data since your last payroll or absence run, you can run the calculation process again only for those payees. There is no need to reprocess all of your payees. You can rerun your calculations as many times as necessary, until you are confident of your results.

Click to jump to parent topicOff Cycle Processing

Off cycle payroll processing refers to processing payments and making corrections to payroll results outside of the normal payroll schedule. Off cycle transactions are typically made to correct prior payments or to make early termination payments that can't wait until the next scheduled on-cycle payroll.

You can readily launch an off cycle process without creating additional calendars, and the system automatically suspends the on cycle run. This feature is useful for any organization, but especially those organizations that have high attrition rates. Global Payroll supports the following four types of off cycle transactions:

Click to jump to parent topicAbsence Processing

Tracking payee absences is critical for payroll accuracy. You need to know whether payees are sick, on vacation, or absent for another reason. Most important, you need to know whether to pay them for the time they were absent.

With Global Payroll, you define valid absence types and how your organization handles them. You set up absence entitlement and absence take rules and use them to track and pay for payee absences.

Click to jump to parent topicSegmentation

Segmentation refers to the process of calculating all or a subset of elements in a process list in separate slices or segments. You can segment components of pay based on changes in compensation, employee status, or other events during a pay period. For example, if an individual changes jobs during a pay period and your organization separates components earned in the first job from those earned in the second job, you can set up your system to trigger segmentation of earning results on the payslip when there's a change to the job change action/reason field in PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources.

Global Payroll provides two types of segmentation—period segmentation and element segmentation— in order to handle such situations.

Click to jump to parent topicRetroactivity

Sometimes you must correct or add data that applies to a specific pay period after payroll processing for that pay period. Global Payroll's retroactivity features help you handle such situations.

Click to jump to parent topicReal Time Integration with Other PeopleSoft Applications

Global Payroll integrates with other PeopleSoft applications, sharing the same relational data structure, user interface, reporting tools, and configuration capabilities. Because the components are integrated, Global Payroll has access to information from other PeopleSoft tables.