Oracle Payroll FAQs

Payroll

The main purpose of the payroll run is to calculate employee pay correctly at regular intervals. In addition you can perform other payroll processes to ensure accuracy and provide flexibility for your organization. For example, you can roll back a payroll run when you want to carry out a test run without keeping any record of it having taken place. You can also run a Retro Pay process when you want to make retrospective adjustments to allow for backdated pay awards.

What are the mandatory fields while creating Payroll?

Payroll Name, Period Type and Start Date

Define Elements

Elements are the building blocks for earnings, deductions etc. of a Payroll.

Salary Basis

Salary basis is the duration on which the salary is reckoned. It is a rule to administer pay.

Define – Quick Pay & Batch Processing

When calculating pay, we can use either

- Quick Pay Process, which is for one employee or

- Batch Process for all employees together

What is Retro Pay, Advance Pay & Absence Pay

- Retro Pay – Payment for any previous cycle in the current payroll run

- Advance Pay – Payment for any future cycle/advance in the current payroll run

- Absence Pay – Payment for leaves like sick leave, maternity leave, annual leave and other statutory leaves

Define Batch Element Entry

This is an open interface specially designed for elements. With BEE we can quickly incorporate mass updates in any specific elements.

What are Reversal and Retry?

Reversal can be used to correct run results for one assignment after post-run actions have already occurred. Retry is for correcting mistakes after a payroll process finishes.

Which elements you link openly in Payroll?

Worker’s Compensation and Vertex (Vertex is a third party software to calculate US Canadian taxes) using Quantum files. (It is part of Vertex software which will be updated as and when the tax and legal rules are changed by the US/Canadian Government. So we keep getting the Vertex patches to bring Quantum files with the up to date tax rules and conditions)

What is Consolidation Set, Element Set & Assignment Set?

Consolidation Set: A grouping of payroll runs within the same time period for which one can schedule reporting, costing, and post-run processing.

Element Set: Grouping of all individual elements into one set.

Suppose you want to define a special type of payment and make this available only to employees who work at a particular location. In Oracle HRMS you use a compensation element to represent the payment. You define the business rule as a link between the element and the specific location. Then when you assign employees to the location, they automatically become eligible for the payment.

Assignment Set: Grouping of assignments for retro pay is generally referred to as Assignment Set.

What are Fast Formulas?

Fast formulas are pseudo codes used in the payroll for validating the entry values, assignment sets and element sets.

Post Payroll Process

Three concurrent processes will run in the Post-Payroll process, viz.

1. Pre-payment Process

2. Costing Process &

3. Transfer to GL Process

What do you mean by Garnishments?

Third Party payments is also known as Wage Attachments, Wage Garnishments and Court orders in different localizations. 3rd party payments are deductions from earnings incurred by Court debts or fines. For example, payment of maintenance, child support or other legally incurred obligations.

What is BACS, NACHA?

BACS: Banks Automated Clearing System. This is the UK system for making direct deposit payments to employees.

NACHA: National Automated Clearing House Association. This is the US system for making direct deposit payments to employees.

Does Oracle Payroll enable you to run part payrolls?

Yes, Oracle Payroll enables you to run part payrolls. This is useful in each of the following circumstances where you do not want to process a payroll for the entire organization.

Calculating Pay for an Individual Employee

If an employee leaves the company before the end of a payroll period, you will need to calculate the individual pay entitlement. You may also want to calculate individual pay to check the details for an employee before starting a payroll run for all employees.

Can you verify that a payroll run has completed successfully?

On completion of a payroll run you will need to verify that the run completed successfully. You can display run messages and view latest balances and assignment level results. You may also need to have relevant information grouped by topic in report format so that you can review the outcome of processing.

Can you make adjustments after a payroll run has completed?

Oracle Payroll enables you to make each of the following types of adjustment when a payroll run has completed.

- Addition of late entries that were not included in the initial run

- Corrections to details that were wrongly entered in the initial run

- Retrospective distribution of current payments to the period in which they were earned

When you have made these corrections and modifications you can then run the payroll again. However, you do not need to rerun the entire payroll. Oracle Payroll will only reprocess those items that were incorrect in the initial run.

Can you produce payment and costing information from a completed payroll run?

Oracle Payroll enables you to use the results of a payroll run to allocate payments to your employees, and to provide costing information.

Ensuring that Employees are paid by the Correct Payment Method

When a payroll run has completed you need to pay each employee according to the payment methods that you have specified. You may also need to override the predefined payment methods where employees are receiving special payments such as bonuses, which may not be paid by the usual methods of payment.

Ensuring that Costing Information can be provided

On completion of a payroll run you may need to distribute the associated costs across particular cost centres. Oracle supports this using the Cost Analysis module.

Can you run payroll processes and reports multi-lingually?

Payroll processes and reports are always submitted and always run in the local language only. This means that US and UK payroll reports can only be run in English.

Can you verify that payments have been made?

Yes. Oracle Payroll is fully integrated with Oracle Cash Management. This enables you to use Oracle Cash Management to verify that payments have been cashed. Reconciliation can be applied to payroll checks (cheques) and third party checks. You can identify which checks have been cleared and the date on which they were cleared. You can also view a reconciliation report which shows if voided checks appear to have been cashed.