A Quick Walk-through of PeopleSoft Absence Management

Overview

Absence Management is an application in PeopleSoft HRMS suit which enables organizations to automate the processes for planning and compensating paid time off (Annual/Sick/Casual/Parental/ Leave etc...) for the employees.
It provides various Self-Service pages for both employees and managers to raise and approve the absence requests respectively. Admins can also raise the requests on behalf of staffs and administer them through dedicated pages.

Elements of Absence Management

There are various elements used in Absence Management that combined to form the entire architecture of the Absence system.
Absence Event - The period for which an employee is absence for the same reason for example, an employee is on Annual Leave for 1 week then this 1 week absence is the event.
Absence Take - The element which represent the reason for Absence Event. In above example, Annual Leave will be the Absence Take.
Entitlement - The amount of paid time off an employee is entitled to take for an Absence Take.
Entitlement Balance - The amount of unused entitlement
Adjustment - A deduction or addition made from/into the Absence Entitlement balance.
Units - The period of time in which entitlement, take, adjustments, balances, and other absence-related time periods are measured. Typically, units represent either hours or days

Key Concepts in Absence Management

1.     

Triggers

You can create triggers in Absence Management to detect changes made to data in Human Resources. This enables Absence Management to identify payees automatically who needs to be recalculated during an absence run.

Iterative Trigger

An iterative trigger tells the system to process (or reprocess) a payee in the current open calendar, possibly because payee data has changed or the payee was terminated or payee has raised another absence request during the same calendar period.

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Retro Trigger

A retroactive (or retro) trigger tells the system to reprocess previously calculated (closed) calendars.

Example:

 An employee has raised an absence request for the month of Oct which is a past dated absence request. This absence request will be detected Retro Trigger and processed.

Segmentation Trigger

This trigger tells the system to process a payee’s absence when a data change occur in the middle of the pay period, by dividing the pay period in two segments for the correct result.

Example:

A person gets promoted to a higher grade on 17^th of the current month and now they are eligible for more number of leaves hence, Segmentation trigger will detect this change and two segments will be created for this pay period 1) 1^st to 16^th and another from 17^th to 31^st of the month

Retro Processing Methods

Retro is a term used in Absence when the absence is recalculated for the already closed calendars.

Corrective Retro Processing

This method recalculates all the past dated absences from the month in which the retro even has occurred and update the accumulator for each month with re-calculated results.

Example:

This is the absence data for an employee as on Month of March which is current month.

Jan Entitlement = 1
Jan take = 0
Jan balance = 1
Feb Entitlement = 2
Feb take = 0
Feb balance = 2
March Entitlement = 3
Jan take = 1
March balance = 2

Now, the employee raises an absence request for the month of January so this is how the absence data will look like when this request is processed through corrective method.

Jan Entitlement = 1
Jan take = 1 - recalculated
Jan balance = 0 recalculated

Feb Entitlement = 2
Feb take = 1 recalculated
Feb balance = 1 recalculated

March Entitlement = 3
Mar take = 1 recalculated
March balance = 2 recalculated

Forward Processing

How Absences are Processed in PeopleSoft Absence Management System

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Setting Up Absence Management

Here is what you all need to do in sequence to set up Absence Management

Security Setup 

This is the first thing we do when we start the Global Payroll and Absence Management set up. There are two types of security setup for Global Payroll and Absence Management

Element-level security (Set Up HRMS, Security, User Maintenance, Global Payroll User Profile, User Rules Profile )

• Restricts the elements that a user can view or update, based on the User Rules Profile page and the Used By, Owner, and Override Levels fields on the Element Name page.

Payee-level security (Set Up HRMS, Product Related, Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt, Elements - All Element Definition Components)

• Restricts the payees that a user can view, based on the standard HR security in PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources.

Setting Up Absences

There are broadly areas from where the setup is done:

1. System Setting
2. Elements
3. Framework
4. Schedules 
5. Triggers

System Setting

This is where the setup begins. In this area some installation and schedule settings are done along with countries setup like what will be the default retroactive method that should be used in absence processing etc...

Elements

Primary Elements - Absence Take and Absence Entitlements
Supporting Elements - Accumulators, Formula, Variable, Bracket, Array etc...

below diagrams shows in what order the elements are created:

Navigation: Set Up HRMS – Product Related – Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt – Elements

Generation Controls

If we want to have a control on the element that during absence processing, it should be resolved only when it meets certain criteria then we use generation control elements.

Generation control works as a switch for another element to be resolved, if the switch is on then the element will be resolved, if switch is off then it won’t.

Scenarios where Generation Control element is used:

If an employee is on Leave of Absence (LOA) then the annual leave entitlement shouldn’t be given to them in which case we can create a Generation Control element which will find out whether an employee is on LOA and based on that it can decide whether the Annual Leave Entitlement element should be resolved or not.

Framework

Once the elements have been defined, the framework for processing various absences is setup. Below snapshot is showing the order in which this setup has to be done:

Navigation: Set Up HRMS – Product Related – Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt – Framework

Schedules

Schedules define workplace attendance expectations for groups of employees, and include definition of

The workdays, scheduling units, and holidays. This information is important to the absence process because it tells the system whether a reported absence occurred during a scheduled work time. Absences during

Scheduled work periods may be paid if they meet your organization's absence rules.

Navigation: Set Up HRMS – Product Related – Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt – Schedules

Triggers

We Setup various triggers to detect changes occurred in the absence/employee’s data so that that they can be processed during Absence Run.

Navigation: Set Up HRMS – Product Related – Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt – Triggers

Self Service Setups

We configure the absence take elements for Self-Self service users as to how the page will look like, whether forecasting to be used, what will be the error message to be thrown when employee is not eligible for leave, what are all the fields to display in absence request page etc…

Navigation: Set Up HRMS – Product Related – Global Payroll & Absence Mgmt – Absence Management

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