Time banks: Annual roll-over

Bank roll over.

Rolling over a time bank is like getting a new deposit book at your bank. (You may be too young to remember these things.)

Effectively, the bank year (deposit book) is closed off, and the ending balance is transferred to a new book.

In this metaphor, the bank book is the (TIMSUM) employee time bank record.

Each bank for each employee needs to be rolled over.

In computer terms, this means a creating a new TIMSUM (bank record) for each employee. The TIMSUM record holds employee banks totals for the year. The details (deposits and withdrawls) are kept in attendance detail TIMEDT and can be viewed by clicking on the DETAILS button.

Reference year

Every bank has a reference year. The reference year is defined in the bank plan (attendance plan).

Fixed reference year

Most time banks have a fixed reference year – typically the beginning of a particular month – which is the same for all employees.

In this case, the common current year (for all employees) is shown on the attendance plan.
You will normally roll over all employees at the same time.

Individual reference year

But for certain banks, employee may have an individual reference year – typically the anniversary of their hire date. (Common in B.C. vacation banks.)

In this case, the (anniversary date) rule in specified on the attendance plan
The employee's individual bank (TIMSUM) record specifies the current bank year.

With individual reference years you will need a tool you can run each pay, which rolls over times banks for employees whose anniversary date fall within that that pay period (or in the coming month or so).

The PREPAY tool has a way to do this.

Rolling over a time bank

There several tools in Umana for rolling over time banks

From the employee time bank record

This method rolls over the bank for one employee.

This is a great way to test your rules. Roll over a single employee and see what you get. If it's not right, just delete the new year (created by the roll-over), tweak your rules, and try it again.

See also Simulation mode below.

Open the TIME BANK window for the employee
Select the employee's current bank to be rolled over.
Click the TOOLS button and choose ROLL OVER TO NEXT YEAR.
- This rolls over the current year over to the next year.
- It is particularly useful when employees have individual anniversary dates.
There is also an option to REDO THE ROLL OVER to this year.
- You might want to use this after adding a transaction to the employee's previous year, to insure it is included in his carry-over amount.

From the attendance plan window.

This method rolls over the bank for all employees with that plan.

From the attendance plan window you can roll over everyone's bank for this plan.
Select the plan and click the Tools menu

This method lets you roll over all employee with that bank You can here select which plans to roll over.

Top-menu > Tools > Maintenance > Attendance, Payroll > New Year: Roll Over Time Banks

This tool lets you roll over a bank in simulation mode. In Simulation mode Umana prints what it intends to do without actually updating the data base.

From the PREPAY tool

If you have individual anniversary dates, you can use the new PREPAY tool for banks with anniversary dates during the current period.

When should I roll over a bank?

This is not a stupid question!

It depends on the kind of reference year: fixed or individual.

1. Fixed-reference-year Banks

For these banks, all employees are usually rolled over at the same time.

(You can also do it by plan, or even for a single employee.)
There are reasons to roll over early; there are reasons to roll over later. You can even roll over once, and then redo it. This can even be part of your normal strategy.

Late roll-over

Rolling over after all the transactions for the past year have been entered make sense. You might think of this as a late roll-over. That way, the old year is closed and the final balance is either cashed out or carried over to the new year. But wait...

Early roll-over

Depending on your rules, however, you may be calculating bank entitlement at when the bank is rolled over. And you may need to have that entitlement deposited so than employees can know their bank balances – possibly view then on their pay stubs – and so that Umana can know if an absence request is valid.

Do both

One compromise solution is to do both. (Yes, it actually works.)

Roll over the bank early to calculate the the new entitlement. The new year entitlement does not typically depend on the balance at the end of the old year.
Later, when all the transactions for the past year have trickled in and been processed in the old year, redo the roll-over. This time, maybe cashing out the final balance, now that it is known for sure.

2. Individual-reference-year Banks

You will want to roll over banks for those employee with individual reference (anniversary) years ending in the current pay period.

This needs to be done after all attendance detail entries have been made, but before the net pay is calculated.

The tool designed for this is the PREPAY engine. It has an option for finding those employees and rolling them over.

It can also catch employees who should have been rolled over already but were not been.
Of course, you can always open a single employee's time-bank window and roll it over from there.