Understanding Effective Dates and Sequence Numbers
This section provides overviews of effective dates and sequence numbers.
Most of the public table pages contain the Effective Date field, and also yearly rates. For most of these tables, you never add another effective date; you simply add a new value with the same effective date.
For example, the 30-Year Treasury Bond table has the effective date January 1, 1900. Under that effective date, there are values for every month since July 1, 1994. As new values become available, simply add them under the existing effective date.
In certain cases, however, the information for a particular year does change. For example, each year the National Average Wage table includes estimates for the most recent two years. In 1998, for example, the table did not contain data for 1998. It contained estimates for 1997 and 1996, and there was final data for all prior years. The 1999 table replaced the estimate for 1996 with a final amount. Overwriting the estimate would make historical calculations invalid because a calculation for an employee who terminated in 1998 uses the rules as of 1998 and cannot use information that was not available then. Therefore, it is important to have a new effective date to preserve the historical data so that the system can use the appropriate value, depending on an employee's termination date.
When you do create a new effective date, be sure to include values for the entire date range in the table. For example, a calculation based on a 1999 retirement would only be able to access the national average wage for the years shown in the 1999 table. If that table does not have data from earlier years, the calculation is compromised.
Note: The National Average Wage table is the only one of the delivered tables that regularly requires new effective dates. Only very unusual events would require new effective dates in the other tables.
Most of the public table pages contain the Sequence field.
When you implement Pension Administration, you use the Table Lookup utility to enable certain functions to look up information on tables. In order for you to reference a table with the Table Lookup utility, the table must conform to certain requirements. One requirement is that it contain a sequence number field, which the Table Lookup utility uses to order the rows.
If you use the tables that PeopleSoft maintains, you can ignore this field. If you maintain the data yourself, be sure to sequence the data appropriately.