Kronos Workforce Central: Automatic Reallocations

Another hidden gem within Kronos’ Workforce Central is the ability to automatically move the allocation of hours around. What does these mean, move hours around? Well, you already know that when an employee works they accrue time in both pay codes as well as in labor levels. Pay Codes will determine how the employee is paid for the time worked, and the Labor Levels determine where the hours get charged (labor distribution). Pay Codes are determined within the Pay Rule / Work Rule combination (actually within the Pay Code Distribution within the Work Rule) while the default labor distribution is determined by the Home Labor Account in the employee’s person record.

When an employee works, the hours go into the Pay Codes and get charged to their default specific Labor Levels. As my wife would say, “go straight until otherwise directed”. If timecard editors do nothing, the hours follow the path that has been laid out for them. Sometimes we direct the hours elsewhere by either performing a pay code edit to change the Pay Code, or we perform a labor transfer to accrue the hours in a different Labor Account. Sometimes we even want to do both. 

Certain features in Workforce Timekeeper can be assigned to the employee to help us automatically redirect the flow of hours without us performing a specific pay code edit or labor transfer, intrigued?

The Percent Allocation rule allows us to change the labor distribution automatically. For example, let’s say your Labor Level structure has one level for company and one for department, the employees perform department transfers at the clocks, and the payroll interface requires the company level to be changed as well as the department level. 

Quite often a lookup table, consisting of specific companies tied to specific departments, is added to the payroll interface along with the logic to ensure that the hours are allocated correctly. The end result being a company transfer transaction is added to the department transfer based on the combinations listed in the table, when the hours are sent to payroll. While this sends the correct information to payroll, you cannot get the proper reports out of Workforce Timekeeper during the pay period because the company allocations have not been entered into Workforce Timekeeper, they were created while sending the hours to payroll.

Enter in the Percent Allocation rule (or an Adjustment Rule). These rules can automatically change the distribution when the transfer is entered – right in the timecard. The employee’s department transfer is entered at the clock, and when you see it in the timecard the company transfer will have been added to it.  It is done by the totalizer.

Another great use of Percent Allocations is if you need to force a labor transfer on a particular Pay Code Edit. Maybe all Jury Duty transactions should be charged to an overhead departmental account and not the employee’s home department. A rule can be configured so that when the Pay Code Edit is entered a department transfer is automatically created. This saves the employee or timecard editor a step and eliminates a place for possible errors.

The above scenarios are very simple examples meant to get you thinking. The Percent Allocation rule is a powerful tool that helps automate rule based transfers. It gets its name from the ability to do fixed allocations. If 25% of an employee’s time is paid for by a research grant, then Kronos Workforce Timekeeper can be setup so the employee just punches in and punch out as normal and the system will allocate the time such that 25% appears in one labor account and 75% in another. No special scheduling, no bulk transferring of hours needed, the system does it for the employee. 

Fixed allocations can be setup within the HR/Payroll system but when it is done there it kind of renders the Kronos reports inaccurate because the information is not captured within Kronos.

Helping redistribute or reapportion hours is a major function of Percent Allocation rules. There are other creative ways to use Percent Allocations, but they will be covered in a future article.

Please note - Adjustment Rules, Percent Allocations and Wage Profiles are all great tools to have in your bag of tricks. Adjustment Rules and the Percent Allocation feature are newer, improved replacements to the older Wage Profile feature. These new rules are preferable to Wage Profiles because they are effective dated while the Wage Profile is not. Effective Dating allows these new rules to start and stop on a certain date rather than apply to everything that has not been signed-off. For this reason I would try to use the newer rules if you are incorporating them into your systems today.

Jeffry