The "Kronos Guy" Blog

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. 

There is a lot of talk about Kronos Workforce Timekeeper and the Totalizer.  Whereas the IT types and system administrators know this stuff, what about the rest of us?  Well, here is a quick introduction and explanation of the Totalizer. 

How many times have we heard the old cliché don’t reinvent the wheel? Under normal circumstances the phrase usually applies as a standard catchphrase for many things in life. Per Wikipedia's definition: "To reinvent the wheel is to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others". As it is one of the key sayings that have been used lately and one that I have enjoyed over the years, I felt it worthwhile to write about the particular topic when it comes to your Kronos pay or work rule configuration. The catchphrase can also be applied to configuring other areas of Workforce Timekeeper (display profiles, accruals, or <your idea here!>).

Have you learned about PCOS yet? PCOS is an old-style, C DLL invoked by the so-called WFC Totalizer Hook. The Totalizer Hook, implemented it in WFC 4.1 or 4.2, was a way to hook in some C processing in the Smalltalk totalizer. The Custom group at Kronos used the hook to perform three different alterations to totals, and it uses "configuration parameters" from one or more special database tables to control how it does this.

OK. Per our Kronos Totalizer advisor and occasional blog poster DG, as of 5.2 there is no longer any such thing as a Callable Totalizer Engine. The so-called Callable Totalizer (CT) was an artifact of the Smalltalk implementation of the totalizer in 5.1 and earlier. From 5.2 onwards, all on-the-fly totalization goes through the same (multithreaded) totalizer servlet stuff.

It seems that Kronos pulled the Callable Totalizer (CT) into the main Totalizer program with the Background Processor (BGP) starting at v5.1 or 5.2. My CT notes were from v5.0. I don't have a 5.1 system to look at right now but I'll check and report back later if someone here doesn't beat me to it!