Kronos Workforce Central Employee Effective Dating (Part 1)

Mark your calendars and let’s talk about dates, specifically employee effective dates! I’d like to start off by posing some questions that came up during a recent implementation for an employee import:

-What effective dates should we use for a new hire? What about position changes?

-What do other fields that have an effective date in Workforce Central (WFC) work together and why are they important?

-Should we keep it simple, or do our needs become more complex for employee effective dating?

For those new to effective dating, saving an employee in the WFC People Editor (with no values) can help to validate ANY required effective dates. When a new employee is manually added, effective dates for the fields listed below are required in the People Record by Workforce Timekeeper:

• Employment Status (defaults to today)

• Pay Rule (defaults to “Beginning of Time”)

• Primary [Labor] Account (defaults to today)

Here are some scenarios that illustrate the importance of dates for the fields listed above...

1.     Add a new employee

Our first example for adding an employee is to use the dates supplied by Workforce Timekeeper. Basically, you keep all effective dates the same as the hire date. The employment status effective date and other fields cannot be before the hire date. As an aside, employee totals will not calculate until the effective date of the employee's status (active or inactive). So it is optional to set the pay rule effective date to a different date than the Kronos literal “Beginning of Time” (default). The “Beginning of Time” is 1/1/1753 according to Kronos.

The second example when adding an employee is to use effective dates that are after the hire date. For instance, you would like the hire date of today, but the employee does not start working until the future. WTK (Workforce Timekeeper) is flexible enough to allow the employment status effective date and labor account effective date to be after the hire date. If however, the employee comes to work before the future date, you will see hours coded to a -/-/-/-/-/-/- account (what WTK labels “undefined”). To remedy this, the labor account effective date would need to be set to the when the employee started working. Now you know why we suggest using the hire date for all of these effective dates...it's easier at the start and minimizes the chance of "issues" later! 

2.     Recording the promotion for an employee

What if an employee changes their position, or is promoted? A change to their labor account is required (and possibly a Primary Job change if the employee is Scheduler licensed). For ease of use, both the labor account and the primary job use the same effective date. That date changes to reflect the date of the position change or promotion. A position change may also invoke a new pay rule and accrual profile assignment and a new effective date for both fields.

3.     Recording the termination of an employee

I hate to see you go, but when an employee must move on, it is easily handled in WTK. Simply go the employee’s People Record, access the Licenses work-space on the Person tab, and uncheck the box next to Workforce Timekeeper.  

There are no dates to change here!!! 

Also, when you set the Status field for the employee to Terminated, WTK will also automatically take away the employee license for you.

Tips for working with effective dates:

• If an employee is not visible from the Quickfind Genie for a range of dates, it may be due to the Employment Status field effective date on their People Record. The QuickFind Genie will only show active employees. Use an Ad Hoc Genie to find the employee by name or number or try a different date.

• Effective dates can be based on the start of a pay period, or today, but generally the employee's Active Status Effective Date or Hire Date should be used.

• Effective dates may be automatically passed via a Person Import from another system and can over-ride anything a manager puts in, so check with your Kronos supervisors before you make any changes! 

• Effective dates work in conjunction with sign-off. For example, if you change an employee's Status field make sure the corresponding effective date is set to a time period that has not been signed off.

• Any time an effective date is entered into WTK, a window of time is defined. To see the history, access the “History” drop-down from WTK People Editor.

Stay tuned for another article where I will discuss Workforce Scheduler effective dated items for an employee!

Comments are also welcome! How do you currently handle effective dates for your Kronos employee population?