What Is an Element?

An element is the smallest component of Global Payroll. Elements are building blocks that relate to other building blocks to define your payroll system.

You define each element only once and use it repeatedly anywhere in the system.

This table lists the element categories:

Type of Element	Description
Data retrieval	Retrieves data. Some are predefined elements (called system elements) that are delivered by PeopleSoft. Others you define when creating your payroll system.
Calculation	Performs a calculation.
Organizational	Defines the structure and framework for the system.

This table lists alternative element categories:

Type of Element	Description
Primary	Represents primary rules for earnings, deductions, and absences.
Supporting	Usually not used alone, but used to create other, more complex elements such as earnings and deductions.
Miscellaneous	Represents such things as eligibility criteria, accumulators, and certain types of rules.

You can combine these elements in an unlimited number of ways to produce the results that you need for your payroll processing.

Example

Let's say that you want to calculate a payee's bonus pay. One element might be defined to contain the base bonus amount. Another element might be defined as a bracket element that retrieves the correct percentage of the base bonus based on a payee's seniority. Still another element might be defined to calculate the bonus earning by multiplying the base bonus amount (from a variable) by the percentage of bonus base from the bracket lookup to produce a bonus earning amount.

This example shows how elements relate to each other in Global Payroll.