Concepts

There are many processes in HR and payroll that are date triggered. For example

• Finishing probation
• Benefit waiting periods (for coverage and RRSP plans)
• Accumulating seniority
• Merit and service pay increases

What makes these complex, is that for some employees (typically on-call employees), these are triggered after having worked a certain number of hours, rather than a number of calendar days.

So essentially, there are two kinds of future dates

• Firm (fixed), calendar-based dates are easy to know. For example, with a 3-month probation period it is easy to add 3 month to an employee's hire date to get it probation end date.

• Estimated dates, based on hours worked are harder to work with. And like a weather forecast, the closer the date the more accurate the estimate.

  For these you can calculate an earliest possible date (if the employee works the maximum possible hours), or you can get an most likely date (estimated based on his work history). Umana usually works with the earliest possible date, so you can't miss it by mistake.

Recording and updating future dates

In a computer system, it is always easier to work with a date stored in a record somewhere in a data base. Then you can view it, filter it, print it, sort it, and so on.

Umana has places for storing all those dates. It also has tools for updating them.

• A firm (fixed) date can change when an employee's status changes. For example, if an employee changes from a union to a management job, instead of having a 3-month probation period it might become a 6-month period.

  Umana usually updates these dates automatically when an employee's status changes.

• An estimated (fuzzy) date can change each pay period, based on the number of hours worked.

  Umana has tools to run during the payroll process to update these. See Prepay tool and Payroll Process

Tools in Umana

Umana offers a number of tools to help you.

Counters

For hours-worked actions, Umana needs to count up hours worked from employee's the Attendance detail (TIMEDT).

But typically, you only count certain pay codes. Umana counters lets you specify a set of pay codes to count, and provides a mechanism to count hours (or dollars) with those selected pay codes, for a date range.

Benefit waiting periods

See Benefit plans, particular the Eligibility tab: waiting period. Also note the automation tab options.

The waiting period can calculate a date which is firm or estimated.

Dated alarms

Dated alarms are a mechanism to trigger an action (or send a message) on a specified (calculated) date for an employee. It builds a tickler file of upcoming dates. Each day it looks in that file for actions that need to be handled that day.

Umana comes with a number of prebuilt alarms that you can activate or copy.

The tickle date of any dated alarms which are based on hours worked needs to be refreshed each pay cycle.

Watches

Payroll and pre-pay process

Merit and service pay increases

Accumulating Seniority