How does Pacific Timesheet manage employee onboarding, terminations and rehires

Question

How does Pacific Timesheet manage employee onboarding, terminations and rehires

Answer

Background

Pacific Timesheet, for larger-scale systems, will receive data feeds from the ERP/Payroll for onboarding new employees, terminations and rehires.

There are certain systems operations at work when onboarding, terminating and rehiring employees that need to be understood:

Automated timesheet creation

Active and locked employees, if assigned a timesheet template in their employee profile, will have timesheets automatically created by the system each time period.

Employee status

All employee records have one of three statuses: active, inactive or locked. Each status will have the following system behaviors:

Locked Employees

• Crew employees who do not have to log into the system can be setup with a locked status. Crew employees are a timekeeper scenario where another user, e.g. foreman, crew lead, enters time for that employee. In certain cases, this employee account might not count against the license key.
• Individual employees, not on crews, who do not have to log into the system can be setup with a locked status. In this case, a timekeeper user will enter time for this locked employee and submit their timesheet.
• An active user's status will be changed to "locked" by the system if logins to the user's account fail to authenticate three times or more. In this case, the user account will remain locked and inaccessible to any user until its status is changed back to active.  

Active Employees

Active employees are system users with an active login to access the system. There are several types of users with an active status:

• Individual timesheet users who edit and submit their timesheets.
• Expense tracking users who edit and submit their expense sheets.
• Managers, with or without their own individual timesheets and expense sheets, who approve employee timesheets and/or expense sheets.
• Managers, with or without their own individual timesheets and expense sheets, who review, monitor and/or report on system data. 
• Crew employees who review but not edit their individual timesheets. These users sign off or report a problem with their timesheet data entered by a foreman or timekeeper.

Inactive Employees

There are two use cases for Inactive Employees:

• • A formerly locked employee who is terminated. This type of inactive employee will have their last day set. The inactive status will mean their timesheets will no longer be created by the system.
  • A formerly active employee who is terminated. This type of inactive employee will have their last day set. The system will also clear out any future scheduled leave requests from the system. The user’s login will no longer work and future timesheets will no longer be created by the system.

Onboarding New Employees
When onboarding new employees, Pacific Timesheet employee records need to be setup with a few important properties:

• Status (e.g. locked, active, inactive). An employee can be setup as active should also be set with a first day. 
• Login Name (e.g. could be Employee ID, email address. FirstName.LastName, etc.)
• Security Permission or system role (e.g. Field Employee, Office Employee, Foreman, Superintendent, Payroll Manager, etc.)
• Timesheet Template (the timesheet template that drives the format of their system generated timesheet)
• Policy (Labor and other rules for employee data)
• First day. Employee timesheets cannot have data entered prior to the first day.  
• Contact information fields (e.g. First Name, Last Name, Employee ID, Job Title, Email Address, Time Zone, Locale, etc.)
• Approver (e.g. Supervisor Approver, etc.)

Terminating Employees
When terminating employees, Pacific Timesheet employee record settings should be changed as follows:

• Status. A terminated employee status must be set to inactive. Inactive employee timesheets will no longer be created by the system.  
• Login Name. No change required.
• Security Permission. No change required. 
• Timesheet Template. No change required. 
• Policy. No change required.
• Last day. When change employee status to inactive, set the last day of their employment. Time and expense data cannot be entered after an employee's last day.  
• Contact information fields. No change required
• Approver. No change required.

It is important to not modify an employee records key settings. This provides an audit trail of their last settings while they were employed. The settings should remain in place in case they are rehired.

Rehiring Employees
When rehiring employees, Pacific Timesheet employee record settings should be changed as follows:

• Status. Set to inactive. Employee timesheets start being created by the system.  
• Login Name. No change required.
• Security Permission. No change required. 
• Timesheet Template. No change required. 
• Policy. No change required.
• Last day. When an employee is rehired, clear the last day setting to blank. 
• First day. Reset the first day to the rehire date.
• Contact information fields. No change required
• Approver. No change required.

Data Processing 

A newly-created employee’s data will be added to the employees.csv flat file or web services message. This can be sent to us on a scheduled basis (e.g. once per hour or per day).

When we process that file or message, if an employee ID of a new record does not match to an existing employee ID, we automatically create the new employee record in our system.

If the employee ID of a record already exists, the system matches and updates that record.

Data files and messages can update a smaller number of fields in employee records, e.g. status, first day, last day, etc.

Ongoing maintenance and updates of Employee Records

Here is a cheat sheet for typical use cases for changes in status:

• • • • • Termination of Crew Employee - Locked => Inactive, set last day date value.
        • Termination of System User - Active => Inactive, set last day date value.
        • Rehire of Crew Employee – Inactive => Locked, clear old last day value, set new first day value.
        • Rehire of System User – Inactive => Active, clear old last day value, set new first day value.