Using Action and Reason Categories

This section provides an overview of the pension job stack and discusses how to use action and reason categories with pension functions.

Although many action and reason events are important to pensions, others are not. For example, assignment completion is unlikely to impact pensions. Even events that may seem to be significant for pensions may turn out to be irrelevant. For example, a transfer action is not itself significant, but the new location or job may be.

At the beginning of every pension calculation, the system identifies all the codes you include in action and reason categories and creates a pension job stack. This is a job history that excludes all the events that have irrelevant action and reason codes.

Then, when you calculate service and consolidations, the pension functions further filter the job stack to include only the action codes referenced in a function's parameters.

Three Pension Administration functions reference action and reason categories: service, consolidated earnings, and consolidated hours.

Using with Service

Service calculations break an employee's career into segments, based on the action and reason history.

For the elapsed time and hours equivalence methods, indicate which categories of actions and reasons start and stop service. You can apply minimums and maximums for particular statuses.

Hours counting service uses the segments only for applying minimum and maximum accruals. The action and reason history does not control service accruals because service is based on the actual hours worked, as recorded by payroll.

Using with Consolidated Earnings and Consolidated Hours

Earnings and hours consolidations use action and reason histories to:

  • Generate earnings and hours for specified statuses.

  • Identify partial periods based on events occurring during the period.

  • Identify hire and term periods in order to annualize earnings and hours from those periods.

Earnings consolidations use action and reason histories for two other purposes as well:

  • You can determine the partial period fraction, the portion of the period during which the hours and earnings are attributed, using the action and reason history.

  • If you calculate earnings based on compensation rate, you can exclude pay earned during a particular status.