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Roll-up Genies - Tools of the Trade


Payroll Close Genie vs. Pay Period Close Genie: 

I know you are familiar with the Pay Period Close Genie. This is a detail Genie that lists all the employees (a manager can see) and shows if their timecard is approved, signed off, or if there is anything left for the manager to do (missed punches or Unexcused Absences), but what about the Payroll Close Genie – the one that summarizes all the facilities – the one that the payroll department can look at to see if they are ready to process payroll.

Kronos GenieThe Payroll Close Genie is a wonderful Genie, however it is missing from many of the implementations that we start working with. Since it is not part of the “stock”, Genies that comes pre-installed on the disk, many times it never gets created. It is not part of the stock Genies because it is based upon labor levels and labor levels are not part of the basic information that is supplied out of the box.  Labor Levels get defined once the implementation gets underway. This is one of the BIG value add Genies.

The purpose of this Genie is to give Payroll a window into the system so that they know when to transfer the hours out of Kronos and into the Payroll Processing System. This Genie is a special type of Genie – it is a Roll-Up Genie. It is called Roll-Up as opposed to the Detail Genies that detail the employee level information because it summarizes the data. You get to choose how you want the data Rolled Up. Do you want information rolled up by Division? By Store? By Cost Center? By Manager? By Division and Manager? You get to choose; and you get to choose for each Genie. You can roll up the information by any and all labor levels – yes, you do need to roll up by a defined labor level.

Let’s say that you had 10 stores and you processed the payroll just once for the entire company. You need to know that all the timecards were approved, and that the individual stores signed off ALL their timecards before you process payroll. If you had a Payroll Close Genie that was rolled up by the store labor level, you could get all this information on one screen in just 10 lines.

In this case, the Genie should contain the Store, Total number of employees included, Total number of employees not yet approved by a manager, the number of employees who have not had the sign off even issued, and the total of the employees whose totals have not been signed off by the system. This information alone solves problems for many clients who sometimes process payroll a bit too early.

The difference between issuing a sign off for an employee in the timecard and having the totals signed off is the work of the Totalizer or Background Processor. When the supervisor clicks the sign off button (issues a sign off), the totalizer recalculates (starts fresh) all the employee’s totals for the period and then considers the timecard signed off (checks that Totals Up To Date checkbox on the detail Genies). If you were to take the totals before they were completely signed off, you may be missing some data.   

These Roll-up Genies are powerful. Heck, you can even put a few pay code totals on these Genies.<<DANGER WILL ROBINSON>> You NEED to be careful with that though. All Genies use HyperFinds to select their employees, and HyperFinds qualify by the employee’s HOME labor accounts. That means that no labor transfers are taken into account. (if you were assigned to Store 100 and worked in Store 500, all your hours would be listed under Store 100). Workforce Central 6.2 introduced a new Worked Hours Genie type that changes this, but unless you are using those, you are seeing all hours worked listed under the HOME Labor Level. There are also some performance ramifications involved here when you add pay code to the Genies. Depending on your particular system this may need to be examined before you add a number of columns.

If you do not have any Roll-Up Genies in your system I would strongly advise looking at having some created for you; otherwise you are missing out on a very powerful and time-saving feature of Workforce Timekeeper.

Jeffry

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