Timekeeping overview

Timekeeping automates the collection, management, and distribution of employee hours. It allows organizations to configure business rules for managing employee time, such as pay rules that determine what is overtime, who is eligible for overtime, who is working what job, and what is the schedule. This domain also allows organizations to schedule employees and manage accruals and vacation time. Time and labor data are collected from Series 4500 and InTouch terminals and delivered through Universal Device Manager to the suite, from which it can be used directly by Accruals, Activities, dataviews and reports, Insight Metrics, Scheduling, and other components.

User actions and flow

Employees enter and approve their time as well as request overtime, add comments, transfer charges, view their schedules, and approve their time.

Managers review employees' time, make necessary changes, and approve and sign off timecards.

Payroll administrators are often involved in a final sign off process and take delivery of the information contained in all employees' timecards after the pay period closes and payroll is processed.

Employees

Timekeeping allows employees to specify and attest to actual work performed, usually against a schedule and involving input from time entry devices. Timekeeping provides employees with a means to make vacation requests, enter sick time, enter time spent in training, and enter time worked as paycode edits. Accruals are also tracked in Timekeeping. Common accruals include vacation and sick time.

Timekeeping assesses and tracks exceptions against a schedule. When employees enter time, Timekeeping notifies them of any exceptions that arise. These exceptions are handled by the Control Center.

Entering time

Time is entered in three ways that correspond to different categories of employee.

Hourly employees

Hourly employees typically punch in and punch out using a time entry device. This method records the exact amount of time an employee worked in a day.

Hourly employees can specify whether they are transferring to a different job. Timekeeping keeps track of certain facts about each employee, such as their primary job and home labor category.

Project (salaried) employees

Salaried employees, also known as project employees, typically charge their time against projects. These employees can specify the hours they worked on various projects and can enter vacation or sick time using pay code edits. Salaried employees use Hours Worked when entering their time.

Timestamp employees

Timestamp employees typically use a very simple interface containing one action button that they press when they begin, end, or take breaks from their scheduled shifts. The system uses rules to determine what each activation of the button represents.

Managers

Timekeeping allows managers, who are ultimately responsible for ensuring employees are correctly paid, to perform all the steps necessary to correct and submit accurate records of employees' time to payroll.

Managers:

• Manage and resolve exceptions
• Review and edit Timecards by adding pay code edits, missing punches, and so on
• Approve Timecards after employees have submitted their approvals
• Depending on the structure of your organization, managers may signoff Timecards or a payroll administrator may perform this task

Payroll administrators

At the close of a pay period, a different process begins. Once all employees have entered and approved their time and managers have reviewed, edited, approved, and submitted their employees' Timecards, those Timecards typically move to a company's Payroll Administration group for final processing.

Once Timecards have been signed off, no further changes can be made. Signoff initiates a Totalizer process called Pay Period Close. After this point, changes can only be made through Historical Corrections.

Components of Timekeeping

Each component within Timekeeping has a primary job. To complete that job, the component interacts with many other components within the system. This section focuses on the primary components in Timekeeping.

Background Processor and Totalizer

The Background Processor keeps employee totals up to date so that any other suite component working with employee data has up-to-date information.

Overview

The Background Processor runs continuously. Its main component is the Totalizer, the code that performs all the business calculations required to keep employees' totals up-to-date. Other components of the Background Processor save the information calculated by the Totalizer and maintain employee status with regard to totalization. The Background Processor runs independently of the other Timekeeping components.

Totalizer

The Totalizer processes spans of time and has a set of pay rules mapped to each employee. Based on those rules, the Totalizer automatically segregates or "chunks" each employee's time. Note that pay code edits allow you to manually chunk time, bypassing the default Totalizer behavior and its method of chunking time.

Callable Totalizer

The Totalizer is also the major component of the Callable Totalizer, a component that provides up-to-date employee totals to users as they work. The Totalizer in the Callable Totalizer and the Totalizer in the Background Processor are identical; that is, the same code performs the same calculations to keep employee totals up-to-date. The difference is that the Background Processor saves the updated totals; the Callable Totalizer provides the updated totals to users as they work and does not save any information.

When totals are calculated

Totalization is performed when data that affects the totals has changed. For example:

• Employee punch data from terminals has been collected and recorded.
• A timecard was edited and saved, resulting in a change in hours or in a pay code.
• A timecard was signed off by a supervisor.
• A pay rule, paycode, work rule, or other rule was changed.
• A schedule was created or changed.

In addition to specific data changes that affect employees' totals, the Background Processor also updates employee totals according to the following settings, regardless of any activity:

• If totals have not been updated after a specified number of days has elapsed.
• If actual totals have not been updated through a specified number of days into the future.
• If scheduled totals have not been updated after a specified number of days has elapsed.
• If scheduled totals have not been updated through a specified number of days into the future.

Group edit framework

Group edits are changes made to time and attendance data in multiple employee records in a single operation. The group edit framework submits the group edit for processing, allowing users to proceed with their work while the group edit framework completes the data processing in the background.

Hyperfind queries

Hyperfind constructs, saves, and runs Boolean language queries that ask the suite a question. Hyperfind is used mostly by components, such as dataviews, reports, and Scheduler, to retrieve employee IDs for their operations.

Paycodes

Paycodes enable managers and employees to organize time or money that employees earn, and identify spans of time for payroll purposes. For example, paycode distribution defines how much an employee is paid for normal time and for overtime.

Pay rules

Pay rules control how time and attendance information is processed for each employee. In a pay rule, your company defines how each segment of time is marked. For example, pay rules allow you to define and record a normal pay period and an overtime period inside a time segment.

Shifts

Shifts define blocks of time. They are the structure in which time data is created, used, analyzed, and stored. Unless shifts are available, users cannot enter punches or create schedules, and Timekeeping cannot process time data in any kind of meaningful way.

Employees work shifts of a specific length on a specific day (or spanning the divide between two days). Shifts can exist any time in the past, present, or future. The manager or the system must explicitly assign these parameters:

• Start time and date
• End time and date
• Employee assigned

A shift can have a label and can include the child objects Comment and Notes, but neither are mandatory.

Timecards

Timecards are records of employees' work time, including amounts and time stamps. A timecard includes totals, exceptions, punches, comments on punches and pay code edits, transfers, cost centers, pay rules, and annotations. Timecard updates support Pay from Schedule functionality.

UI Setup

When Timekeeping is first initialized, administrators use the Setup feature in the UI to define the structure of the organization, including labor categories, pay rules, work rules, function access profiles, and accrual codes. The definitions of these items form the basis for how time is accounted. Therefore, any change in UI Setup could have a significant effect on Timekeeping operations. For example, a change in a pay rule might require that all employees be totalized.