Loading Payroll Data

You can load payroll data in one of two forms:

• Raw data about earnings, hours, and contributions that Pension Administration can consolidate.

• Already-consolidated data.

The advantage of loading raw data is that the system performs your consolidations. For example, if an employee in Plan A transfers to Plan B and Plan B needs earnings data that predates the transfer, Plan B cannot use the consolidated data from Plan A. If the raw data is in the system, you can easily use the Plan B consolidation rules. Loading raw data is also advantageous if you make a correction to your method of consolidating the data.

The system does not use raw data during calculations. Data must be consolidated for the system to recognize the information.

If you currently store your payroll data as consolidated amounts, it might be more efficient to load consolidated data.

Load earnings data for use with the final average earnings (FAE), cash balance accounts, and social security functions.

• For final average earnings, you must load earnings history only as far back as the FAE function checks. For example, if your FAE definition uses only the final five consecutive earnings periods, load only those periods—or a few more, if there's a possibility that some periods might be ignored.

• For cash balance accounts, if you load a startup balance, do not load earnings history for periods before the startup balance as of date.

• For social security, if you estimate career earnings based on the current and prior periods only, do not load more than those two rows of earnings data.

Load hours data for use with the service function, but only for hours counting methods. If you load a startup service balance, do not load hours data for the periods before the startup as of date.

Load contributions data for use with the employee accounts function. If you load a startup balance for your employee account, do not load contribution data for the periods before the startup balance as of date.

Raw payroll data resides in two places:

• Payroll tables, which are populated by PeopleSoft Payroll for North America.

• A set of pension clones, where you can archive the data to protect it from the periodic purging to which the payroll tables are subject.

If you load raw payroll data, do not put the data in the Payroll for North America tables. These tables are managed by Payroll for North America, not by Pension Administration, and they are subject to periodic purging. Instead, load the data into the Pension Administration clones.

During consolidations, Pension Administration first checks the Payroll for North America tables. If those tables do not contain data for the period being consolidated, the system checks the pension clone tables. If the system finds data in the clone tables, it ignores data in the source tables. The system does not compare the data in the two tables; after it determines which tables to use, it ignores the others. If neither set of tables contains data, the consolidation displays zero earnings, hours, or contributions for the period.

Periodic processing enables you to copy data from payroll tables to the pension clones for archiving. In Payroll for North America, you use this process to archive raw data on an ongoing basis.

The data that you need depends on your consolidation definition. For example, if you consolidate hours based on W-2 earnings (which requires you to provide an earnings-to-hours divisor), you need data from the W2_AMOUNTS table.

Rather than loading raw payroll data into the system, you might load consolidated amounts. In this case, study the tables where the consolidation processes store their results so that the data you load is consistent with the data that the system's consolidation processes might create. The following tables contain consolidated data: