The HR year
Read the modules as a year rather than as a menu, and the whole system falls into place: a little is done once a year, a fixed round is done every month, requests arrive every day, and the rest happens when something happens to somebody.
Once a year
This is the work that, if it is not done, stops everything else in about the second week of January.
The calendar and the public holidays
Before anything else, the company needs to know which days of the new year it works. Open Calendar and lay out the year: which days are working days, which are weekends, and what working time applies to each. The working times themselves come from Time Template, which you set up once and reuse every year. A whole year of days is tedious to key by hand, which is what Calender Date Template is for. Then put the year's gazetted holidays on Public Holiday.
A factory and an office usually need two calendars, because one works six days and the other five. That is fine: the calendar a person follows comes from his Employee Policy Profile.
See calendars and shift times.
The pay periods
The pay periods for the new year have to exist before the first run of the new year. They are set up inside the cycle, on Payroll Period, and the screen can generate a year of them from the cycle's frequency rather than making you key twelve rows.
This is the single most common thing to be caught out by in January. See the checklist.
The leave allocation
New leave year, new entitlement. Leave Allocation Run is what gives every eligible person his year's quota, and the same screen is what carries forward whatever the Leave Group policy allows to be carried. On this screen saving is running: the document is both the instruction and the record of what it did.
What a person then holds is visible on Employee Leave Entitlement. People who had not joined or had not been confirmed by the run date are skipped, which is the right answer and also the reason a new joiner's balance is empty until the next run reaches him.
See leave.
The appraisal cycle
Once the year's performance period opens, the appraisal is cut. Evaluation Cycle is the document for one period: it names the form from Evaluation Template, the population from Performance Target Entity, and the window the review runs in. Activating the cycle works out who it covers. Generating sheets then cuts one Employee Goal sheet per person.
Managers score on Evaluation Tracker inside the window.
The increment
At the end of the cycle the committee settles the numbers on Calibration, and Evaluation Increment Matrix is the table that says which score band earns which rating and which bonus band.
See performance.
Every month
The same four steps, in the same order, every period. This is the heartbeat of the system.
- The roster. Before the month starts, who works which shift. Shift Roster puts a pattern from Shift Pattern onto a list of people for a date range. Two crews rotating against each other are two rosters on the same pattern with different anchor dates, not two patterns.
- The attendance. Through the month, punches arrive from the machines and land as attendance. HR watches Employee Attandance, fixes what the machine got wrong, and clears the requests that correct it. Attendance Policy is what decides whether a late arrival is forgiven or costs something.
- The attendance sheet. At period end, Payroll Attendance turns the month's attendance and leave into one line per person: the days to be paid and the days to be deducted. This is the step people skip, and the payroll run will not do it for them.
- The run and the posting. Payroll reads the attendance sheet, the salary structures, the recurring payments and deductions, the overtime, the loans, the contributions and the tax slabs, and produces the payslips. Post Payroll then hands the totals to the accounts.
Two things about that order are worth saying out loud.
The run reads the sheet, not the punches. If the sheet is wrong, the payslip is wrong, and re-running the payroll will not help: the sheet has to be corrected first. And once the payroll for a period has been processed, the attendance sheet for that period can no longer be saved or deleted, which is deliberate.
See the payroll run.
Every day
Requests come in and approvals go out. This is the part of the system most of the company will ever see.
Employees raise Employee Request Leave, Employee Attendance Request, On Duty Request, Overtime Request, Shift Change Request, Comp Off Request, Request For Expense Reimbursement, Employee Loan Request and Profile Change Request. Managers approve them.
Remember what approval means here. An approved Employee Request Leave is what creates the Employee Leaves record and moves the balance. Until it is approved, nothing has happened at all.
HR's daily work alongside that is the employee record: new addresses, new identification documents, a corrected bank account, a note of a training attended.
When something happens to somebody
A joiner
- Employee Basic Information for the person himself, with his joining date.
- Employee Organization Assignment to place him: business unit, department, position, grade, salary structure, policy profile, who he reports to, and the date he starts. Nothing downstream can see him until this exists.
- The records that hang off him: Employee Address, Employee Contact, Employee Identification, Employee Bank Details.
- Put him on a roster, and allocate his leave.
Where the person came through recruitment, an accepted Offer and an Employee Onboarding record with its Onboarding Checklist carry most of this for you.
A leaver
Resignation records the intention. Employee Clearance works through what has to be handed back and signed off. Final Settlement is the last payment: the part month, the unused leave, the gratuity where Gratuity Policy provides for it, less whatever is outstanding. The Organization Assignment is given a Date To, and from the next day he is in no roster and no payroll run.
A transfer
A new Employee Organization Assignment from the day the move takes effect. Do not edit the old one. Saving the new one closes the previous one the day before, so the month he moved is split correctly between the two departments.
A promotion
The same thing, with the grade and usually the salary structure changed on the new assignment. Where it follows an appraisal, Salary Revision is where the revision is recorded.
If something looks wrong
- "The January payroll will not run" - there is no pay period for January. Generate the new year's periods on Payroll Period.
- "Nobody has any leave balance this year" - the Leave Allocation Run has not been done for the new leave year.
- "Half the staff show as absent all month" - the calendar has no working days keyed for those dates, or the people are on no roster.
- "The new joiner is not in the payroll run" - he has no Organization Assignment covering the period, or his policy profile names a different payroll cycle.
- "The payslip is wrong and re-running does not fix it" - the error is on the attendance sheet, not in the run. Correct Payroll Attendance first.