The order of setup
PeopleNest is set up in a fixed order, because every stage is picked from a list the stage before it built.
If a word on this page is new, it is in the glossary. There is no clever way round it. You cannot build a salary structure out of wage types that do not exist, and you cannot put a man in a department that has not been keyed in. Work in the order below and every list you need is already there when you open the screen. Work out of order and you will spend the week going backwards.
Three rules that cause most of the backtracking
A position is a job, not a seat in a department. The Position screen holds the job title and the salary structure that normally goes with it. The department does not live on the position. Department and position are brought together per person, on the Employee Organization Assignment, which is why that one record is the hinge of the whole system.
An employee can be typed in, but not placed, until the lists exist. You can key a person's name and joining date with nothing else set up. What you cannot do is place him, and an unplaced person is invisible to everything: no roster, no payroll run, no appraisal. The assignment that places him needs a department, a position, a salary structure and an Employee Policy Profile, and it refuses to save without the policy profile.
A payroll run with no wage types produces nothing. The run builds a payslip one named line at a time, and every line is a wage type. No wage types means no salary structure worth having, no lines, and an empty run that reports no error because there was nothing to go wrong.
Stage 1 - The company and its structure
What you are building: the company itself, and the lists that everything else in the system points at.
The screens: Legal Entity, Business Unit, Department, Business Area, Functional Area, Country, State, City, Organizational Structure.
Skip ahead and: every later screen offers you empty lists. This stage is cheap and it unblocks everything, so there is never a reason to leave it half done.
Stage 2 - The calendar and the shift times
What you are building: what a working day is. The clock times a shift runs between, which days of the year the company works, and which of those days are holidays.
The screens: Time Template, then Calendar, Calender Date Template, Public Holiday, then Shift Pattern and Shift Roster.
Skip ahead and: attendance cannot be judged, because nothing knows whether a given date was a working day or what time the man was due. Everybody comes out absent, or everybody comes out fine, and neither is true.
Stage 3 - Leave
What you are building: the kinds of leave the company gives, bundled into a policy, and the entitlement each person holds.
The screens: Leave Type, Leave Group, then Employee Leave Entitlement and Leave Allocation Run once the people exist.
Skip ahead and: the leave group cannot be named on a policy profile, so the people cannot be placed, so nothing downstream works. The leave types and the group have to be in place before the people, even though the entitlement itself comes after them.
Stage 4 - The people
What you are building: the job structure, then the people, then the record that places each person in the company.
The screens: Position Grade, Position Category, Position, then Employee Basic Information and the records that hang off it, then Employee Policy Profile and Employee Organization Assignment.
Skip ahead and: nothing at all. This is the stage everything after it reads.
Stage 5 - Salary and wage types
What you are building: the named lines a payslip can carry, how much of each a person gets, and the periods pay is run for.
The screens: Wage Type Category, Wage Type Group, Wage Type, Pay Scale, Pay Rate, Salary Structure, Payroll Cycle, Payroll Period, Pay Area, Payroll Group, Payroll Setting.
Skip ahead and: the run produces nothing, silently. Of everything in this list, the pay periods are the one most often forgotten, and the symptom is a payroll that refuses to find the month.
Stage 6 - Contributions
What you are building: provident fund and the other statutory or company schemes, each with the rate it takes and the base it takes it from.
The screens: Contribution Scheme, and the Contribution Schemes grid on Employee Policy Profile where some profiles are in only some of the schemes.
Skip ahead and: the deduction never appears, or worse appears on the payslip without being taken off the net. A scheme needs its two wage types to exist first, which is why this stage comes after salary and not with it.
Contributions and provident fund
Stage 7 - The first payroll run
What you are building: confidence. Everything above is a hypothesis until one period has been processed end to end and the numbers have been checked by hand.
The screens: Payroll Attendance, then Payroll, then Post Payroll.
Skip ahead and: you hand over a configuration nobody has tested. Run one month, for a handful of people, and reconcile a payslip with a calculator before you run it for five hundred.
Stage 8 - Performance
What you are building: what people are measured on, who is measured on which form, and the period the measurement covers.
The screens: KPI, Evaluation Metric, Evaluation Template, Performance Target Entity, Evaluation Cycle, Employee Goal, Evaluation Tracker, Calibration, Evaluation Increment Matrix.
Skip ahead and: nothing breaks elsewhere. Performance reads the people and the structure and is read by nothing in payroll, so it is safely last. Do it last.
And then
Training and recruitment can be set up at any point after the people exist. Neither is in anybody's way.
Before the client goes live, work through before you hand over. It is six checks, and each one of them is a support call that will otherwise arrive in the first month.
If something looks wrong
- "The list is empty on the screen I am filling" - you are a stage early. Find what the field points at and build it first.
- "I set everything up and the payroll run produced nothing" - no wage types, no salary structure, or no pay period. In that order of likelihood.
- "The employee exists but no module can see him" - he has no Employee Organization Assignment, or it does not cover the date being asked about.
- "It let me save it but nothing uses it" - it is still a draft, or the record carries an Active tick that is not ticked. See how a screen works.