Override

Payroll Costing
When Entering
Absences
Enable employees to override payroll costing by providing additional
information during absence entry, and thus ensure the absence cost is
allocated to the correct cost account in General Ledger.

WHITE PAPER / MAY 13, 2019

PURPOSE STATEMENT
This document provides a solution for specific business needs of certain customers who may use
features and enhancements included in release 19A of Oracle HCM Cloud. It is intended solely to
help you understand the solution approach and assess the possibility of implementing the solution in
your organization.

DISCLAIMER
This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information that is the
exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential material is subject to the
terms and conditions of your Oracle software license and service agreement, which has been
executed and with which you agree to comply. This document and information contained herein may
not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or distributed to anyone outside Oracle without prior written
consent of Oracle. This document is not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated
into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.

This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in planning for
the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a commitment to deliver
any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document
remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all features
described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the code.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Purpose Statement ...................................................................................... 2

Introduction .................................................................................................. 4

Business Need ............................................................................................. 4

Prerequisites ................................................................................................ 4

Implementation Considerations ................................................................... 5

Use Case for a Sample Implementation ...................................................... 5

Configuration Steps ..................................................................................... 6

Step 1: Identify the Payroll Costing structure for your legislative data group................................ 6

Step 2: Verify properties of the segments to be overridden .......................................................... 6

Step 3: Create corresponding segments in Absence Entry DFF .................................................. 8

Step 4: Identify Payroll Element referenced on the Absence Plan ............................................... 8

Enter an Absence and Verify Cost Overrides .............................................. 9

Additional Information ................................................................................ 10

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INTRODUCTION
This paper outlines an implementation solution to enable your employees to provide additional
information in Absence entry that will be used to derive certain segments of the Payroll Costing
flexfield, and thus ensure the cost of the absence is allocated to the correct cost account in General
Ledger. You will be enabling element entry-based costing on the absence.

BUSINESS NEED
If your company is implementing activity-based costing, you may have devised a method to allocate
the cost of absence transactions to specific cost-accounts in your General Ledger. You may be
deriving the cost account using the information of the employee for whom the absence is created. For
example, Department, Cost-Center, and so on. Often, you’ll find the need for a greater degree of detail
in allocating the cost of absence, based on the project the employee has been working on when the
absence was recorded, or the environmental code within the project that pertains to this absence. In
such situations, you may want to ask your employees additional questions when they record an
absence and use this information to derive the cost account to which the cost of the absence will need
to be allocated.

These requirements are also applicable for companies that do business with governments. In certain
government contracts, the government offers to reimburse certain absences for employees working on
specific projects. So, when an employee enters an absence transaction that falls during a specific
project period, they need to provide additional information about the project they are working on. This
information is then used to allocate the cost to specific accounts in General Ledger.

This paper is aimed to provide a simple way to configure your application to meet these requirements.

PREREQUISITES
Before moving any further, we first need to evaluate whether the solution offered in this paper applies
to you. Read through the following list of prerequisites to understand if you have everything in place to
implement this solution.

• You are running Oracle HCM Cloud Release 19A or above. Release 19A includes certain code
changes that makes this solution work.

• You are using Oracle Cloud Absence Management. This solution only works if you have
implemented Oracle Cloud Absence Management. Your users can enter absences directly using
Absences user-interface, or you use one of the published interfaces (REST / HDL) to enter
absences.

• Oracle Cloud Absence Management is integrated with Oracle Cloud Payroll. The solution
assumes the following:

– You have implemented Oracle Cloud Payroll

– You have implemented Oracle Cloud Payroll Costing as per the instructions in the guide “Global
Human Resources Implementing Payroll Costing”. The costing flexfield segments you wish to
override must be configured to be controlled at the element entry level.

– The absence plan that will be used to record the absence must be integrated to Oracle Cloud
Payroll. This is required because this solution uses an existing infrastructure to carry information
from the absence transaction to the costing flexfields

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• Absence Transactions Descriptive Flexfield (DFF) has some unused attributes. You will be
configuring descriptive flexfields for absence transactions. If you have not enabled the DFF, you will
need to enable it for this solution to work. If you are already using the DFF, you need to have room
to configure additional attributes.

• You are familiar with setting up Oracle Cloud Absence Management, Payroll and Flexfields:
This solution involves making configuration changes to Absence Management and Payroll. You will
also be accessing some flexfields, making certain changes and re-deploying flexfields. This paper
assumes you have access and familiarity to these configurations.

IMPLEMENTATION CONSIDERATIONS
Review the following considerations before you proceed. The solution works only if the possible
conditions are met.

• Employees need to create separate absences for each cost-allocation override. This solution
only works with DFF attribute values at the absence level and not at the daily breakdown level. That
is why a separate absence needs to be created for each override value.

For example, consider a field engineer working on a communication tower. The engineer was
supposed to have worked on replacing a defective part on the tower from Monday to Wednesday
(Program: Outdoor – Repair). Thursday and Friday would have been spent upgrading the software
of the communication system (Program: Indoor – Software). If the employee had worked for the
week, the cost for the time spent would have been allocated to the appropriate cost-accounts.

If the employee takes the whole week off, and you want the absence cost to be appropriately
allocated to the correct cost accounts, the employee will have to create two separate absences, one
for Monday to Wednesday, with Program selected as “Outdoor – Repair” and another absence for
Thursday and Friday with Program as “Indoor – Software”.

• Cross-segment validation of Cost Allocation Key Flexfield (KFF) is not employed. If your
company needs cross-segment validation for the cost-allocation KFF, it might interfere with this
solution when an overridden value of one segment isn’t compatible with the default value in another
segment. This may result in errors when you transfer the costs to your General Ledger.

• Absences entered through time-cards are not in scope. The solution outlined here does not
work for absences entered through time-cards.

USE CASE FOR A SAMPLE IMPLEMENTATION

As an example, consider this scenario at an organization called Vision Corporation. This company has
a Legislative Data Group (LDG) that is called Vision Corporation US LDG. The cost-allocation
segments in this LDG is built up of several segments. Some of the segments are:

• Fund
• Appropriation
• Funding Source
• Department
• Organization
• Program
• Project
• Grant

5 WHITE PAPER / Override Payroll Costing When Entering Absences

Each costing segment is set up so that when payroll costing is run for the period, the default value
appears for each of these segments based on:

• Certain attributes of the job the employee is assigned to do

• The payroll assigned to the employee
• The department the employee is working in
• Other attributes of the person itself (element entry level).

The current behavior is that the cost-allocation account is constructed by concatenating the default
values of each of the segments provided above.

The goal is to allocate the absence costs into separate buckets based on the program the employee
was working on when they took time off. When entering an absence, the employee needs to be able to
select a program from a list of valid programs stored elsewhere in the system. When the absence
transaction is transferred to payroll and eventually costed, the value the employee chose for Program
needs to be used to allocate the cost of the absence being entered.

CONFIGURATION STEPS
To override payroll costing, you need to make certain configuration changes. Here are the steps to set
up your application.

1. Identify the Payroll Costing Structure for your Legislative Data Group
2. Verify properties of the segments to be overridden
3. Create corresponding segments in Absence Entry DFF
4. Identify Payroll Element referenced on the absence plan

Now, let’s review each configuration change that needs to be made, and understand how the
suggested configuration helps us achieve the goal stated above. Each of these configuration steps
can be performed from Setup and Maintenance.

Step 1: Identify the Payroll Costing structure for your legislative data group
Navigate to Manage Legislative Data Groups. Search for your LDG, and tap on it to see details.

Figure 1: Legislative Data Group Details

You will find the Cost Allocation Structure assigned to your LDG here. In this example, the structure is
Progress Cost Allocation.

Step 2: Verify properties of the segments to be overridden

Navigate to Manage Cost Allocation Key Flexfield. In the next page, you should see the Cost
Allocation Flexfield selected. Click Manage Structures and search for the structure associated to your
LDG. In this example, you can see Progress Cost Allocation. Select it and click Edit.

6 WHITE PAPER / Override Payroll Costing When Entering Absences

Figure 2: Segments of the Cost Allocation Flexfield Structure

You should be able to see all the segments already configured on the structure and locate the
segments that your employees need to be able to override. In this example, there is only one segment
– Program. You can select that and click Edit.

Figure 3: Segment Details of the Cost-Allocation Flexfield Structure

From this page, note the following:

• The name, segment code, and prompt of the attribute are all set to ‘Program’
• Value Set Code is Progress_Programs
• This segment value can be entered at the Element Entry level. This solution does not work if
this condition is not met because absences are recorded at the element entry level.

You need to repeat this exercise for each segment you want your employees to override.

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Step 3: Create corresponding segments in Absence Entry DFF
Navigate to Manage Global Absences Descriptive Flexfields. Select
ANC_PER_ABSENCE_ENTRIES_DFF. For each cost-allocation segment that you want employees to
override, create a DFF segment with the name and value set matches with the corresponding cost-
allocation segment.

Figure 4: New DFF segment "Program"

You can choose the other fields (prompt, data-type and so on) based on your requirement. Once the
segments are added, re-deploy the DFF. In this example, since the only segment that needs to be
overridden is the Program segment, we have created a new DFF attribute called Program.

As you can see in Figure 4, we have ensured that the name of the DFF segment is the same as the
name of the Cost-Allocation KFF segment. Also, we have used the same value-set and then re-
deployed the DFF.

Step 4: Identify Payroll Element referenced on the Absence Plan

Your employees will need to choose an absence type when entering the absence. The absence type
could be linked with one or more absence plans. Open the Manage Absence Plans page, search for
each of the absence plans and identify the payroll element linked to each plan. In each of your
absence plans, you will have to ensure you have chosen to transfer absence information to payroll and
selected the payroll element linked to each of the plans.

Figure 5: Payroll element linked to the absence plan

8 WHITE PAPER / Override Payroll Costing When Entering Absences

In this example, we have identified the absence plan linked to the absence type the employees will be
using, and that the payroll element associated with the plan is ZOTL_ABS.

ENTER AN ABSENCE AND VERIFY COST OVERRIDES

Now you can try entering an absence to see how this works. Log in as the end-user and enter a self-
service absence. While entering the absence, you should now see the new DFF segments you have
configured. Select a value and submit the absence. Then, check the calculation card for the same
person on the day of absence. You should see that the cost-allocation segment has been overridden
with the value selected while entering the absence.

In this example, we logged in as the end-user Michael Cash and entered an absence using a type and
plan that was used for our defined configuration.

Figure 6: Entering an absence and specifying a cost allocation segment override

Notice the field Program under the Descriptive Information section. When the page loads, the value
does not default. You can leave it empty if you do not want to override the value that Payroll Costing
would derive, but if you want to override it, select a valid value from the value-set. You can see that we
have entered a value of 1200 for the segment Program. What this means is that 1200 will be
considered as the overridden value for the Program segment.

To see if the selected value was used to override Payroll Costing segments, you can navigate to
Manage Element Entries for ZOTL_ABS Entitlement for the same day and move to the Costing tab.
You will see that the value of Program has been set to 1200. When Payroll runs and the absence is
costed, the system derives the values for all other segments of the cost-allocation KFF that do not
have a value. Since the segment Program already has a value, that value will be used when
generating the cost-allocation account.

9 WHITE PAPER / Override Payroll Costing When Entering Absences

Figure 7: Checking Cost Allocation Override Value

With this, we see how an employee can now provide additional information about the absence
transaction that will be used to determine how the absence will be costed.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Here is a list of additional resources that you may find useful:

• Oracle HCM Cloud Documentation

• Oracle Cloud Customer Connect Community – Workforce Management

10 WHITE PAPER / Override Payroll Costing When Entering Absences

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