Importance of Effective Dates

You usually update employee job data in PeopleSoft Human Resources for U.S. Federal Government by adding effective-dated data rows to the employee records. When you insert a new row on the Data Control page, the system copies the contents of the previous row into the new row so that you don't have to retype the information that stays the same. (So before you insert a new row, ensure that you're on the data row that you want to copy.) The only new information you see is the effective date, which defaults to the system date, usually today's date, which you can change.

If you want to work on the Employment Data 1 or 2 pages, for example, first insert a new data row on the Data Control page, and then access the appropriate Employment page to enter changes.

Effective dates enable you to maintain a complete chronological history of all your data and tables, whether you changed them two years ago or want them to go into effect in two months. With all this information at your fingertips, you can roll back your system to a particular time to analyze position data or employee records. Or you can roll forward and set up tables and data before they take effect.

The system also uses effective dates to compare pages and tables to ensure that the prompt tables list only the data that is valid as of the effective date of the page where you are working. For example, let's say you create a new department code with an effective date of May 1, 1997. If, on the Job Data pages, you enter a new data row for an employee or update an existing row that has an effective date before May 1, 1997, then when you select a department, you won't see the new code as a valid choice because it isn't in effect yet.