The "Kronos Guy" Blog

When you look at medical or life insurance policies there are generally two layers to them. There is the big concept, large-type section and, of course, the infamous minute detail, small-print section where the gnashing of arcane points is explicitly called out with mathematical precision. Written Pay & Leave Policies in most companies are the same with the big ideas called out in the HR/PR Policy docs and the hair-splitting details called out in…well? Where are all those pay precedence, rounding precision, cascade sequence, over limit, allow less than zero policies documented?  In most companies you actually have to look at the configuration code – Payrules, Workrules, Paycodes, Leave Cascades, etc to know what will really happen when various work and leave hours are run thru the mill. Is this best practice?     

Last we spoke, we were discussing how Kronos Workforce Timekeeper affects the payroll process.  Well, we got half way there.  Follow along as we finish our trip. 

For those following the Kronos New Feature Series, this will be the last article in the series – THE END! However, comment posting will still be available for the entire series. We talked about new features available to customers upgrading to the most current version of Kronos Workforce Timekeeper. The prior articles covered why an organization might use some of the new Workforce Central (WFC) features and why they should consider upgrading. Simply speaking, what’s in it for us? What is this talk about an “Upgrade Studio”? So let's wipe the dust off that old Kronos version and weigh if the change is worthwhile.

Once a pay period has closed, the payroll process begins. Basically, the payroll process incorporates preparing the time collected in Kronos Workforce Timekeeper, reviewing and validating that data, then sending it over to your payroll system. Your payroll system then processes the data and does many things, the most important of which is to provide pay checks or direct deposits to employees.

You are a payroll manager who has recently learned that the parent company is requiring you to use Kronos Workforce Timekeeper.  They have been on the system for years, however, they are now requiring all of the satellite businesses to implement it as well.  I can’t get into the detail, but I will review the basic steps required.  As an overreaching policy for all of these steps, make sure you are as accurate as possible, and that you completely finish one step before starting another.  In this first of two entries, we start to understand how Workforce Timekeeper fits into your payroll process. 

Thanks for welcoming our newest guest author Terry Shook. Terry is the Kronos Application Manager at Philhaven Behavioral Health Hospital in Mt. Gretna, PA, with over 20 years of HRMS systems administration experience. He has a 15 year association with Kronos Workforce products, dating back to version 1B!

We have two client projects underway at Improv now that have “Parallel Testing” on the project plan.    In my experience these appear to come pre-printed on Kronos HRIS/Payroll Project Plans from the factory like Christmas and Hanukah do on a Calendar. It’s there at the end even if you only celebrate Festivus. I recently read a blog on HRIS projects that went as far as this statement about parallel testing:

One of the best things about working for new clients is seeing how they employ essentially the same Kronos software differently to solve very similar, if not identical, business problems.  Over the years this has given our technical specialists a variety of different perspectives—not just on how to get the configuration to work in certain situations but also what it can be like to maintain and change these structures over time.

A customer of ours has engaged us to help them re-engineer their Kronos timekeeping and scheduling environment.  We recently suggested to them that upgrading to the latest version of Kronos from their slightly earlier version might be desirable as part of the project already underway.  Although some leeway was granted to do a test upgrade and assess the pros and cons, the idea was nixed before a formal review was completed.

My father used to ask his young engineer recruits “Where were you when the page was blank?” when they complained about the design of something existing that they had to interface too.  On the face of it the question implies they should have spoken up much earlier. The subtext, however, was usually that since the design often pre-dated the young engineer’s birth he or she may not yet have sufficient seniority to be disparaging other’s designs.  It also reminded people that the original designers designed to the original requirements not to what came along years later with new concepts, methods, tools, or technologies in the mix. So basically if you weren’t in the room when all those requirements were being discovered and decided upon then you probably have no basis to comment.  Until my father’s engineers learned this they weren’t invited to anymore design discussions.