Online Forecasting and Balance Inquiry Processes

Two online absence processes can process future periods of time. You can use these processes to project future entitlement balances or to apply other absence-related business rules to future periods:

  • Absence Forecasting

    Launch this process from the Absence Event Entry page after you enter actual or planned absences. The system executes a user-defined Forecast formula that returns an alphanumeric value that you define, plus a list of values for the elements that you identified when creating the Take definition. For example, your formula might determine if a payee has sufficient entitlement to cover an absence. If yes, the formula could display the value ELIGIBLE on the Absence Event Entry page and return the entitlement balance that remains after the future absence, the length of the requested absence, and other information that you find useful. You can require that a warning message be displayed if a user tries to save absence entries without running the Forecasting process first for certain absence takes.

  • Balance Inquiry

    Launch this process from the Forecast Balance page, where you select a take element and enter the date as of which you want to see balances or other values returned.

The Absence Forecasting and Balance Inquiry processes simulate the Entitlement and Take processes. When you launch either process, the system finds the earliest calendar that has not been finalized for the payee and looks at each subsequent calendar (included in the calendar group template) up through the calendar in which the latest forecasted event (for the Forecasting process) or as of date (for the Balance Inquiry process) falls. The Absence Forecasting and Balance Inquiry processes select only those calendars that are associated with the payee's pay group. Neither process directly affects the regular batch process. However the values resolved for the forecasting system elements can be used by other system elements in the regular batch process.

The Absence Forecasting process updates the forecast value and a date/time stamp (ABS_EVT_FCST_VAL and FCST_DTTM) on the event record (GP_ABS_EVENT). The Balance Inquiry process does not update the event record.

You identify which results you want to see—beginning entitlement, ending entitlement, absence duration, and so forth—when you define your absence take rules. At the end of a successful Forecasting or Balance Inquiry process, the results populate the table (GP_ABS_EVT_FCST). These results are overwritten each time you successfully run the Forecasting or Balance Inquiry process for the same payee. Data is not written to the results tables that are used by the Take and Entitlement processes, but to identical tables with the prefix GPX rather than GP_. When you run the Take process, the forecast value is written to the results table (GP_RSLT_ABS). Consequently:

  • Historic rules return data from the last batch run, not the current run.

  • Arrays that read from the result tables return data from the last batch run, not the current run.

  • Writable arrays are not processed.