Understanding PARs

An employee's history with an agency usually involves many job changes, such as promotions, leaves of absence, layoffs, retirement, pay rate changes, awards, and so on. To maintain both current records and a complete history of employee job data, your employees, supervisors, and human resources officials will regularly submit PARs for these changes in PeopleSoft Human Resources. (Before requesting personnel actions, verify that you've selected the Multiple Jobs Allowed check box on the Installation Table - Product Specific page.)

Requests for updates that you want to make to employee job data begin in the Workforce Administration, Job Information menu. Depending on whether you are an employee requesting a change for yourself, a supervisor requesting a change on behalf of someone in your department, or a human resources official, you must choose Employee Request USF, Supervisor Request USF, or HR Processing USF, where the system prompts you for an employee ID. Go to the Data Control page to begin the request for a new action, and then go to other pages to enter additional information for the personnel action that you're requesting.

The differences between employee, supervisor, and human resources requests are the types of requests available and the workflow routing of the requests after being submitted. Human resources officials may request any of the actions.

The following table lists a sample setup of the pages employees and supervisors can use to enter requests and where those requests can be routed.

When you request a personnel action to make changes to employee job data, the employee status often changes. For example, when you select Retirement, the employee status changes from Active to Retired. Similarly, if you terminate an employee due to death, the employee status changes from Active to Deceased. The employee status is based on either the personnel action, or in a few cases, the reason for the action, such as death. The system sets employee status as follows.

When an employee status is set to Active, Leave with Pay, Retired with Pay, or Terminated with Pay, the system triggers payroll processing in PeopleSoft Payroll and PeopleSoft Payroll Interface.

If your agency uses PeopleSoft Payroll for North America, payroll paysheets aren't generated for employees whose status is Retired or Terminated. You may need to pay employees for a partial pay period or for a time after they leave the agency, however, so use either the personnel action Retired with Pay or Terminated with Pay to ensure that this occurs.

A change in employee status can affect PeopleSoft Human Resources Manage Base Benefits, PeopleSoft Benefit Administration, and PeopleSoft Payroll processing. Specifically for benefits, you may need to suspend coverage during a leave of absence or a suspension. In addition, a promotion or a job reclassification might affect an employee's benefit coverage.

Changes in an employee's status can also impact pension administration.

You usually update employee job data in PeopleSoft Human Resources for U.S. Federal Government by adding effective-dated data rows to the employee records. When you insert a new row on the Data Control page, the system copies the contents of the previous row into the new row so that you don't have to retype the information that stays the same. (So before you insert a new row, ensure that you're on the data row that you want to copy.) The only new information you see is the effective date, which defaults to the system date, usually today's date, which you can change.

If you want to work on the Employment Data 1 or 2 pages, for example, first insert a new data row on the Data Control page, and then access the appropriate Employment page to enter changes.

Effective dates enable you to maintain a complete chronological history of all your data and tables, whether you changed them two years ago or want them to go into effect in two months. With all this information at your fingertips, you can roll back your system to a particular time to analyze position data or employee records. Or you can roll forward and set up tables and data before they take effect.

The system also uses effective dates to compare pages and tables to ensure that the prompt tables list only the data that is valid as of the effective date of the page where you are working. For example, let's say you create a new department code with an effective date of May 1, 1997. If, on the Job Data pages, you enter a new data row for an employee or update an existing row that has an effective date before May 1, 1997, then when you select a department, you won't see the new code as a valid choice because it isn't in effect yet.

On occasion, you may need to enter more than one personnel action that takes effect on the same day. Entering two actions with the same effective date is particularly common when you need to track annual pay adjustments and career promotions that take effect on the same day. Use effective sequence numbers to combine multiple actions and specify which one to process first. On the Data Control page, enter an actual effective date and assign the action, and the system automatically assigns a transaction number/sequence for each personnel action: The first on that date as 1/1 and the second as 2/1.

For example, an employee received a pay rate change and a promotion on the same day. As a result of this pay rate change, that employee's salary was raised by about 2.5 percent. A promotion from a GS-07 position to a GS-09 position produced an additional 7.9 percent increase in salary.

To enter multiple personnel actions with the same effective date:

1. Open the Data Control page for the employee whose data you're requesting to update.

2. For the first personnel action, insert a new data row.

3. Enter a new actual effective date.

   Because it is the first action processed for this actual effective date, the Transaction Nbr / Seq field is 1/1.

4. Enter any other information required to implement the action, either here or in other pages in the component.

5. Change the PAR Status on the Data Control page to Requested so that you can continue on to enter the next action.

6. To enter the second action, such as Promotion, insert another data row.

7. Enter the same actual effective date as the first action.

   The system enters a Transaction Nbr / Seq of 2/1.

8. Continue the same steps required for the first action, entering a new action each time.