Understanding Service Parameters and Accrual Control Tables
This topic discusses:
Common elements.
Tracking accrued service.
Service rules.
Field or Control |
Description |
|---|---|
Calculation Name |
Displays the name of the calculation process. This is the same as the run control ID. |
The Track Faculty Events business process (FACULTY_EVENTS) in PeopleSoft HR offers a tenure tracking feature that enables you to track the tenure eligibility of your faculty using complex rules that you set up.
You can:
Establish rules and calendars for calculating tenure service based on your organization's specific needs.
Track tenure-related data and maintain a tenure service clock for employees on tenure track.
To determine total accrued service, the tenure or flexible service calculation processes the changes, such as date of hire, leave of absence, and maternity leave, related to an employee's job status. To determine which time periods count toward service, the system considers the effective date of the job action and checks the rules that you set up in the tenure and flexible service control tables.
Before setting up service rules, set up methods to handle the time duration between the dates that are used for measuring accrued service.
Once you define your duration, date rounding, and date conversion options, you can set up the service accrual control tables to use the Tenure Tracking and Flexible Service Tracking features.
These features use the elapsed-time method to measure the time periods (duration) between job actions. This method calculates the duration between two raw dates by subtracting one date from another.
The service parameters components enable you to set up different date rules to adjust the effective dates (raw dates) of an employee's job history before the calculation program calculates the elapsed time period between two events (for example, between an employee's date of hire and the date that the employee goes on a leave of absence).
Service parameters are generic across tenure and flexible service calculations. Once you set up a method, you can use it as often as necessary in tenure service and flexible service definitions.
For example, you can use these options when defining a flexible service definition for a seniority rule.
A seniority service rule might state:
A hire date is effective the first day of the month of hire.
A leave of absence doesn't count toward service.
A leave is considered effective the first day of the month if its start date is before the 15th.
A return from leave reinstates service accrual and is considered effective the first day of the month of return.
The service year that you are using has two semesters: August 1, 2005 to December 31, 2005 and January 1, 2006 to May 31, 2006. Your rules specify that each semester counts as 0.50 years of service. You set up HR action categories for hire, leave of absence, and return from leave.
You can set up two date-rounding options. One option rounds the effective date of the history to the first of the month; the other rounds the effective date to the first of the month when the date falls before the fifteenth of the month.
Apply the two rounding options to the HR action categories, using the Service Rules (EG_SERVICE_ELAPSED) component.
Suppose that an employee is hired on August 3, 2005. The employee begins a leave of absence on October 13, 2005 and returns to work on December 1, 2005. This table lists the employee's job history:
|
Action |
Effective Date |
Adjusted Effective Date for Service |
|---|---|---|
|
Hire |
08/03/2005 |
08/01/2005 |
|
Leave |
10/13/2005 |
10/01/2005 |
|
Return |
12/01/2005 |
12/01/2005 |
See Viewing Worker Job History.
For the semester August 8, 2005 to December 31, 2005 (08/01/2005 to 12/31/2005), the employee accrues service as follows:
0.20 years for the period 08/01/2005 to 09/31/2005.
0.10 years for the period 12/01/2005 to 12/31/2005.
For the same semester, 0.20 years aren't counted toward accrual for the period 10/09/2005 to 11/30/2005.
To establish service parameters, you must:
Establish duration options.
Select a calculation method.
Select a conversion method.
Define date rounding methods.
Set up date rounding rules.
Set up a date conversion method.
Establish a database alias.
Turn on the application trace.
Understanding Date Math Methods
A date that is expressed in terms of years, months, and days (YYYY/MM/DD) is a raw date. Raw date subtraction subtracts days from days, months from months, and years from years, for example 2005/01/01 – 2003/08/01 = 0001/05/00, or 1 year, 5 months, and 0 days.
However, consider the subtraction 2005/11/01 – 2002/12/15. You can't subtract 15 (days) from 1; therefore, you must convert one of the months to days. However, when you change the 11 months to 10, how many days do you carry to the day column?
When you set up raw date subtraction methods, you must choose whether to use the actual number of days or an assumed number of days each month. If you use the actual number of days, the number of days depends on the month in question.
In our example, the tenth month (October) is the most recent full month that you can convert to days. October has 31 days, so 2005/11/01 becomes 2005/10/32. You still have to convert 1 year to months to complete the subtraction, but you know that there are always 12 months in a year. As a result, you end up with a date of 2005/22/32, and the equation is 2005/22/32 – 2003/12/15 = 0002/10/17 or 2 years, 10 months, and 17 days.
If you assume 30 days per month, 2005/11/01 becomes 2005/10/31. After you again convert 1 year to 12 months, you end up with 2005/22/31. The equation is 2005/22/31 – 2003/12/15 = 0002/10/16 or 2 years, 10 months, and 16 days.
Setting Decimal to Raw Date Conversion Option
Set up a date conversion option that corresponds to a duration option. This date math should be the same in calculating the service amount and converting the amount to a different display format.
The conversion methods use Months – 1 and Days – 1 instead of just months and days. This represents the number of whole months and days. For example, in the sample date 06/6/06, you're only six days into the sixth month (June). Therefore, the last whole month is the fifth month (May). The Days – 1 component discounts the present day, ensuring that 01/01/06 becomes 2006.0000, and vice versa.
The conversion methods illustrate the conversion from a raw date to a decimal date, but for flexible service conversion, use the rules to reverse the conversion from a decimal date to a raw date.
For example, suppose that an employee has accrued 5.25 years of service. If you assume 30 days a month and 360 days a year, and you are using two decimal places, either conversion method converts this amount to the years/months/days format: 05 years, 03 months, and 0 days.
Setting Up Date Round Options
Employees accrue or do not accrue flexible service or tenure service depending on their employment status. Status changes are reflected in the employee's action and reason history in the PeopleSoft HR job history records: hires, leaves, returns from leave, terminations, and any other action or reason codes that you select.
Because of differences in the rules for different employee groups, you may need to adjust the effective date, depending on the type of job status change. For example, suppose that your organization allows employees to accrue service beginning the first of the month if they are hired before the fifteenth of the month. You can set up a date round option to round the effective date of hire to the first of the month for all employees who are hired before the fifteenth.
To create a rounding rule, set up all three parts of the rule: the rounding day, the rounding rule, and the rounding period.
|
Rounding Day |
Rounding Rule |
Rounding Period |
|---|---|---|
|
First day of |
Next |
Month |
|
Last day of |
Previous |
Month |
Establishing Duration Options
In tenure and flexible service tracking, the duration option is the method used for calculating the period of time between two action events, such as a date of hire and a leave of absence. The system calculates a duration by subtracting the earlier date from the later date using raw date subtraction. The remainder is the duration.
After performing the raw date subtraction and arriving at a duration, the system converts the duration to decimals. When you convert raw dates and durations to decimal equivalents, you convert months and days to partial years. There are several ways to do this, depending on the decimal conversion assumptions and the decimal conversion method that you select:
Setting raw date subtraction parameters.
As in our earlier discussion of raw date subtraction, you convert months to days to perform subtractions where the smaller (earlier) date has fewer days than the larger (later) date, for example 2005/11/01 – 2002/12/15.
On the Calculation Option page, you convert the month by selecting either Actual Days Per Month or Assumed Days Per Month:
If you select Actual Days Per Month, the number of days depends on the month in question. In this case, the tenth month (October) is the most recent full month that you can convert to days. October has 31 days, so 2005/11/01 becomes 2005/10/32.
If you select Assumed Days Per Month, enter a fixed number of days in the adjacent field. The system uses this number regardless of the month in question.
Choosing rounding methods.
Using raw date subtraction, round your dates before calculating the duration.
You round dates by specifying the parameters in the Month Round Rule and Day Round Rule group boxes on the Calculation Option page. For raw date subtraction, the month and day portions of the labels tell you which group box to use. For example, to round days to months, use the Day Round Rule group box.
To round up only, select Round Up if Periods > (round up if periods are greater than) and enter the threshold number of periods when the system should start rounding up. For example, you could round days up to a full month after 25 days. To round up or down, select Round Up if Periods > Else Round Down and enter the number of periods. If you don't want to round the duration at all, select None.
Important! These rounding options operate on the duration endpoint dates; that is, the dates are rounded before the system performs raw date subtraction.
Rounding decimal dates and durations.
The month conversion rules and year conversion rules that you select on the Conversion Options page perform rounding operations during your duration processing. For raw date subtraction, the system uses these settings to round the final duration result.
The settings work the same way, regardless of the value that you are rounding. Select Up to round to the next month or year, Down to round to the previous month or year, or Near to round to the closer of the two rounded values. Select None to avoid rounding.
To round the endpoints for the raw date method, use the rounding rules on the Conversion Options page.