Best Practices for Creating Time Processing Objects

You need to create separate time processing profiles for each unique combination of the time processing objects, as shown in this diagram. To automatically add public holiday entries to time cards, you also need separate profiles for each LDG.

The more processing objects that you create, the greater the ongoing maintenance effort. You want to find a balance between optimizing the time processing experience for your employees and the effort required to maintain that experience.

Here's how the components of the time processing profile work together. The following sections provide some guidelines and considerations to help you decide how many time processing objects to create.

The number of time consumer sets that you need depends on the time consumers needed and the unique configurations of these options for each consumer:

• Validate on time card actions
• Time category
• Approval period

Time Consumer Sets and Time Card, Approval, and Overtime Periods

You need a separate time consumer set for each unique combination of time card, approval, and overtime periods. The approval periods of the time consumer set need to match the time card period of the time processing profile. Each time consumer requires a separate time processing profile.

Time Consumer Sets and Time Categories

What type of time--such as project costing, payroll, absence, or a combination--do your people report and how often? The type of time and the reporting frequency affect how you configure time categories and time consumer sets. Since you can link only one time category to a time consumer, we recommend that you use these delivered categories: All Project Entries and All Payroll Entries. The delivered category All Payroll Entries includes both hours-based and units-based time entries.

The more time categories and time consumer sets that you create, the greater the maintenance effort. Another topic has scenarios and suggested configurations to help you assess how many of these objects you need.

Time Consumer Sets and Validate on Time Card Actions

Create one consumer set for each group of people with different settings for the time card actions that run validation for the same time consumer. Here are examples of how you might create different Payroll time consumers depending on the Validate on Time Card Action selection.

• Save and Submit: For people who report time every day of a time card period, or whose entries you want to report on during the week.
• Submit only: For people who create and submit time cards at the end of their week and for time and labor managers who correct time exceptions.

Time Categories and Time Allocations

Create as many time categories as you need to identify the time entries that you want to allocate to various cost segments.

Time Entry and Time Calculation Rule Sets

You can link only one time entry and one time calculation rule set to a time processing profile. But, you can add as many rules and rule sets to a rule set as appropriate for the people linked to the rule set. Use rule sets to link rules to groups of people who have similar requirements for vacation, time validation, and time processing.

The number of rule sets you need depends on the different ways that you validate reported time and calculate time. Here are some examples:

• You generate validation exceptions for a group of people when their total reported time exceeds 42 hours for the week. You generate validation exceptions for another group when their total reported time exceeds 10 hours a day.
• You pay people an overtime rate of 1.5 times their regular pay. For people working in California, the overtime rate applies every worked hour over 8 hours in a 24-hour period. For people working in Florida, the overtime rate applies for every hour worked over 40 hours in a 7-day period.

Change Audit and Public Holiday Settings

Create one profile for each group of people with different change audit settings. Also create one profile for each group of people who use the same payroll element to automatically create their public holiday entries. Typically, this means creating at least one profile for each LDG. For example, create one profile for people who use the Public Holiday US element. Create another profile for people who use the Public Holiday CAN element. You can have more than one profile per LDG, depending on how many unique settings you've for the other profile options.

HCM Groups

You link one or more HCM groups to each profile. Define separate groups wherever the characteristics are unique across profiles or groups of profiles. For example, you group people into separate groups for these reasons:

• One group has people who work in states that calculate overtime daily.
• Another group has people who work in states that calculate overtime weekly.