Historical Rules

You use historical rule elements to set up rules that retrieve data from prior periods. You can use historical rules in formulas and in fictitious calculations.

An example of using historical rules is when you want to create a rolling average three-month salary. Let's say that you are currently in the April pay period (end of month). You can define a historical rule to go back three months, to the beginning of January, to average a payee's salary. As you move into the May pay period, the three months roll forward so that the calculation of the average is always based on the last three months.

A historical rule can be:

• Attached to an earning or deduction element on the Definition page.

• Attached to any element that's stored in the Global Payroll Earnings/Deductions results table, the Global Payroll Accumulator results table, or the Global Payroll Element results table.

• Used by fictitious calculation elements to find periods to recalculate.