|
PeopleSoft Stabilization:
What to Expect
in the Coming Months top
For many Harvard administrators,
the months since Harvard's PeopleSoft system went live have
been difficult. Your continued patience, resilience, and constructive
feedback have been essential in helping Harvard to stabilize
the new systems and processes. It is appreciated, and we thank
you!
While many of the early problems
have been resolved or greatly reduced, active stabilization
of the PeopleSoft systems can be expected to go on for another
six months to a year. In particular, careful monitoring of how
the system performs across a full year's cycle of HR and financial
events will be needed. During this period, many adjustments
and improvements will be made and documented so they can be
done routinely during the second year. Other near-term stabilization
efforts will include:
- fixing known bugs in the system, making
requested enhancements, and fine-tuning performance (that
is, increasing data processing speed and capacity)
- reorganizing FAD Payroll and improving
related business processes
- staffing "SWAT" teams of Project
and business staff to deal with acute problems in the tubs
- performing additional "waves" of
HR data cleanup, and
- developing new HR-related reports in AWS3.
While we continue to stabilize, however, life at Harvard moves
on. In addition to the work outlined above, we'll be implementing
the following business and institutional initiatives:
- increased benefits for post-docs in July
- July salary increases
- improved process for hiring student temps
in September
- online benefits enrollment for November
- online tracking of paid time off, possibly
in January 2004, and
- improved costing and encumbering functions.
Information about each of these changes will be provided to
tub-level financial and HR officers via weekly meetings and
email updates. The user community should look for coverage of
these events and specifics about what you will need to do differently
in the e-News and in training.
Any changes affecting employees more generally will be covered
in Harvard's employee newspaper, The Resource, and through
other means (for example, the atwork.harvard.edu
website and direct mail campaigns) as needed.
The UIS Help Desk will remain in operation at 6-2001, backstopped
by "Tier 2" system specialists and customer service representatives.
We also anticipate implementing a systems status "bulletin board"
so that users can check to see whether problems they are experiencing
(system down, system slow, unexpected results) have already
been reported, thereby minimizing Help Desk calls and email
notifications.
How Salary Costing Works in PeopleSoft top
How salary costing works in PeopleSoft is
unclear to many people. Here are the basics.
|
1
|
Salaries for all employees have, or
should have, assigned costing in PeopleSoft that contains
the tub, org, fund, activity, subactivity, and root (i.e.,
all chart segments except object code).
Note: The expense object code is determined
by the job code (employee class) and FICA tax status
of each employee for regular earnings. For non-regular
earnings (for example, a bonus, overtime, or meal money),
the object code is driven by the earnings type and employee
class.
|
|
2
|
Each job held has assigned costing,
which can be split coded by percentage (not dollars).
Salary costing gets into PeopleSoft in one of three ways:
- It was converted from IDMS when data
was brought over in September 2002.
- It was entered by FAD Payroll for
employees hired after September 2002 using 33-digit
coding given to them by users.
- One-time costing changes made
by adjusters in Time and Labor.
Note: If costing is invalid or nonexistent
when the payroll is run, the employee's salary will
be charged to the HR department default.
|
|
3
|
Each job is associated with an HR department,
and each HR department has one default costing string,
which is usually:
|
| 4 |
To find transactions that have gone to default costing
rather than the proper or intended funding source, you
can run the following reports:
|
Costing-Related Report
|
What It Shows
|
| Employee Funding Summary
(PeopleSoft OLTP) |
Costing by employee
as of a particular date, including the percentage
charged to each line, and those lines going to
default |
| Detailed Listing and
Detailed Listing Lite (AWS2) |
Salary expenses that
have been debited or credited to activity 799599,
subactivity 0001 can be isolated and downloaded or
printed easily using normal methods |
| Payroll Default Correction
Report (HUDINI) |
Salary expenses going
to default costing |
|
If these transactions are journaled to their
correct coding in a timely manner, and the permanent costing
is changed by submitting a PeopleSoft job data change form (via
ASPERIN for staff in FAS, and via WASABI for SPH staff), then
this situation is a bothersome but normal part of stabilization.
However, if the default costing remains, particularly
for salaries that should be going to sponsored accounts, cost
transfers will be required.
Key point: Submitting a correcting
journal that moves salary expenses to a sponsored account coding
within the same month as the original transaction does not require
a cost transfer. Moving salary expenses to a sponsored account
within 90 days requires that a cost transfer and a hard copy
journal be submitted to OSR. Cost transfers older than 90 days
require written explanation of extenuating circumstances with
backup documentation, signature by a senior school financial
officer, etc.
At this time, some tubs are organizing efforts
with local administrators to clean up the $1.8 million in default
transactions that have occurred since go-live. If you have not
yet been contacted, you may need to take steps to:
- obtain reports or data to determine whether
you have salaries going to default, and
- initiate correcting journal entries and
permanent salary costing changes.
Off-Cycle Check Processing Deadline top
As of January 20, 2003, FAD
Payroll will no longer process off-cycle checks for clerical/
technical, service/ trades, and temporary employees on Mondays
or Tuesdays. This is to avoid data, system, and processing
conflicts during the period when regular payrolls are being
calculated for these workers.
Off-cycle checks will be processed
on the following days:
- Mondays and Wednesdays for faculty, teaching
fellows, and administrative/ professional staff
- Wednesdays and Fridays for clerical/ technical
staff, trades, and temporary workers.
For all of these employee groups,
the off-cycle check requests must be submitted to FAD Payroll
by 5 p.m. on the day before. Checks will be available in Payroll
for pickup on the morning after.
Example: A request for a Wednesday off-cycle check
needs to be in Payroll by 5 p.m. Tuesday, and will be ready
for pickup on Thursday morning. Checks processed Friday will
be available for pickup on Monday.
Detailed procedures for processing off-cycle checks can be
found in this
e-News article.
Emergency payments to student temporaries on Mondays or Tuesdays
can still be made through the existing AP advance process if
absolutely necessary. However, these are not encouraged due
to processing costs and the difficulty of reconciling these
transactions to payroll transactions.
Clarification on Time Admin top
In December, the Save/Run
Time Admin button was removed from the Time Adjuster
screen to improve system performance. Time Admin is now run
system-wide Monday through Friday at 10 a.m., 12 noon, and 2,
4, and 6 p.m.
When Time Admin runs, it picks
up all time entered through the end of the previous week, including
adjustments for all prior weeks back to September 22 (temps
and trades) or September 29 (clerical/ technical). The only
time that is not picked up by the Time Admin process is future
time.
Payroll Calendar Available Online top
The Payroll and Time & Labor
closings calendar for the first quarter of 2003 is on the atwork.harvard.edu
website. The calendar shows scheduled paydays, Time and Labor
closing deadlines, the deadlines for submitting personnel actions
in order to make the next payroll, and the payroll processing
and direct deposit transmission windows for FAD Payroll.
Because it is too difficult to
forecast exactly when the payroll calculation will be completed
months in advance, FAD Payroll now sends notification e-mails
to local payroll administrators when each payroll is calculated,
and again when the payroll is confirmed.
About the e-News
top
The Financial Administration
publishes this semimonthly electronic newsletter for users of
Harvard University's financial, HR, and reporting systems, policies,
and procedures. Generally, the e-News is published on or around
the 12th and 26th of each month.
It contains:
- updates on projects underway to build
or improve University administrative systems;
- information about new University
policies, procedures, and forms;
- reminders about upcoming deadlines
and cut-over dates;
- tips and tricks for working more
easily or productively.
We welcome questions and
suggestions for improvement from readers. If your questions
are of general interest, we will answer them in future issues.
Please send comments, questions,
or suggestions for improvement by email to us at: fad_communications@harvard.edu
|
