The people
This is the stage every other module reads. Get it right and the rest of the implementation is arithmetic. Get it wrong and nothing downstream can be trusted.
There are three parts to it, and they are not equally important. The job lists are small. The employee record is long but mostly obvious. The Employee Organization Assignment is the one that matters, and it is the record most often filled in carelessly.
The order
- Position Grade and Position Category. Two short lists.
- Position. The jobs the company has.
- Employee Policy Profile. The bundle of policies a person follows.
- Employee Basic Information. The person.
- Employee Organization Assignment. Where he sits, from when.
- The records that hang off him: addresses, contacts, identification, education, and the rest.
The job structure
Position Grade is the rung: a code and a name. M1 to M5, or Grade 1 to Grade 18, or whatever the client calls its levels. Grade is what pay scales, leave groups and increment bands are usually hung off, so it is worth getting the client's real grade ladder rather than inventing a tidier one.
Position Category is the kind of job: Management, Supervisory, Staff, Worker, Contract. Also a code and a name.
Position is the job itself: Production Supervisor, Quality Engineer, Accounts Officer. The screen holds the position's code, its name and the salary structure that normally goes with it, and that is nearly all it holds.
A position is a job, not a seat in a department. There is no department on a position, and there does not need to be: the same Quality Engineer position can exist in two departments and in two business units. Department and position are brought together per person, on the assignment. This catches out consultants who expect the position list to be an organisation chart.
Three more screens sit around position, and a first implementation usually leaves them alone:
- Position Task holds the duties of a position, which is what a job description is built from.
- Position Structure relates positions to each other.
- Position Planning and Position Budget Area are headcount budgeting: how many of a position are planned and paid for in a period. A client doing workforce planning wants these. A client that just wants payroll running does not.
Employee Policy Profile
An Employee Policy Profile is a named bundle of every policy a person follows. It is set up before the people because the assignment refuses to save without one.
One profile names:
- The Calendar, so the system knows which days this person's company works.
- The Attendance Policy, which judges his arrivals and departures.
- The Overtime Policy, with lines mapping an overtime category to the pay rate it is paid at.
- The Leave Group, which is his whole leave entitlement policy.
- The Payroll Cycle and the Pay Rate that apply to him.
- The Tax Fiscal Calendar, Tax Zone and Tax Pay Rate.
- The contribution lines, which name the contribution schemes the people on the profile are in. An empty grid means every active scheme applies, which is the ordinary case; lines mean only those schemes; and No Contribution Scheme Applies ticked means none at all. See contributions and provident fund.
Think of the profile as the answer to "which rules does this person live under". Most clients need a small number: factory worker, office staff, management, expatriate. If you find yourself making one profile per person, something above it is wrong.
One warning about the payroll cycle on the profile. The payroll run looks for people whose profile names the cycle being run. A person on the right assignment but the wrong cycle is simply not in the run, with no error, and this is the most common reason one individual is missing from a payslip list.
Employee Basic Information
Employee Basic Information is the person as a person. It is a long screen, and most of it is self-explanatory: name, father's and mother's name, title, gender, date of birth, nationality, place of birth, religion, marital status, number of dependants, native language, photograph.
Three groups of field are worth pointing out to a client.
The dates that drive behaviour. Joining Date, Confirmation Date, Probation and its unit, Notice and its unit, and later Resignation and Termination dates. These are not decoration. The leave allocation skips anybody whose joining or confirmation date is after the run date. A leave type with a minimum service requirement is measured from the joining date. An assignment cannot start before the joining date. If the joining date is wrong, several things are quietly wrong.
Employee Type, from Employee Type, which is permanent, contract, probationary, intern, and so on.
The statutory flags, such as person with disability and its verification date, and the military fields, which exist because some clients report on them.
Only the title, the joining date and the nationality are actually insisted on, though a client can insist on much more through its own field settings. See the company and its structure.
Saving this screen creates a person, not an employee. He has a number and a name, he is in no department, on no payroll and on no roster, and no module can see him. That is the next screen's job.
Employee Organization Assignment
Employee Organization Assignment is the hinge of the whole system. It is the record that says where a person sits and under what terms, between two dates.
It carries his business unit, department, position, position category, position grade, business area, functional area, cost centre, site, station and project. It carries his salary structure, his employee policy profile, and who he reports to. It carries his performance target entity, which is what puts him in an appraisal population. And it carries a Date From and a Date To.
Nearly every module in PeopleNest reads this record rather than the employee record:
| Who reads it | What for |
|---|---|
| Payroll | Whether the person is in the run at all, and which salary structure to pay him on |
| Payroll Attendance | Which people the sheet covers |
| Attendance and leave | His calendar, his attendance policy and his leave group, through the policy profile it names |
| Performance | Which appraisal population he falls in, and who evaluates him |
| Approvals | Who his manager is, from the reporting line |
| Every headcount and cost report | His department, grade and business unit as at the date asked about |
The dates, and why you never edit the old record
A change of department, grade, position or salary structure is a new assignment, dated from the day the change takes effect. You do not edit the existing one, and you do not have to close it either: saving the new assignment closes the previous one on the day before. That is what makes a mid-month transfer split correctly between two departments, and what makes last year's payslip still explainable.
Two protections stop the history being rewritten:
- A Date From earlier than the person's joining date is refused.
- A Date From cannot be moved into a stretch of time payroll has already been run for. The message names the dates.
The current assignment is the one with no Date To. A leaver's assignment is given a Date To, and from the following day he is in no roster and no payroll run.
What it refuses
The employee must be named. The policy profile must be named. Where the salary structure requires accounting dimensions, those must be complete, because the posting will otherwise fail at the end of the month rather than now.
The records that hang off the person
None of these are needed to pay somebody. All of them are what makes the system worth having rather than a payroll calculator.
Contact and identity. Employee Address, Employee Contact, Employee Identification. The identification types and the authorities that issue them come from Identification Type and Identification Authority.
Background. Employee Education against Education Level and Institution, Employee Professional Experience, Employee Certification against Certification and Certification Group.
Capability. Employee Skill against Skill, Skill Group and Skill Rating. Employee Courses against Course and Course Group. These are what Succession Plan and recruitment screening read.
Events. Employee Dates against Date Type records any dated event a client wants to keep. Employee Action Type names the kinds of action taken on a person. Disciplinary Case and Grievance record trouble in both directions. Employee Request Travel and Employee Travel handle trips.
Places and arrivals and departures. Station and Facility are the work locations a person is posted to. Employee Onboarding with its Onboarding Checklist runs a joiner in. Resignation and Employee Clearance run a leaver out. Profile Change Request is how an employee asks for his own record to be corrected rather than HR keying it blind.
If something looks wrong
- "The employee exists but nothing can see him" - he has no Employee Organization Assignment, or none covering the date being asked about.
- "The assignment will not save" - the policy profile is empty, or the Date From is before his joining date.
- "It will not let me correct the assignment date" - payroll has been run across that period. Correct it with a new dated assignment instead.
- "One person is missing from the payroll run and everybody else is there" - his policy profile names a different payroll cycle, or his assignment does not cover the period.
- "The position list has no departments on it" - correct. Department lives on the assignment, not the position.
- "Transferring him rewrote his whole history" - somebody edited the existing assignment instead of adding a new one. The fix is a new dated assignment from the day the move took effect.