Pravas Bhagat from Oracle spoke about several enhancements made to PeopleSoft Global Payroll over the past few years that are intended to make things easier for Developers and Global Payroll Administrators. Some of these enhancements include the Global Payroll WorkCenter, COBOL Trace Utility, and Payroll Element Browser. Pravas gave a demo of these features that shows the ease of personalizing view, running reports, issue resolution, and comparing elements.

Payroll Fluid WorkCenter

The WorkCenter updates have six major benefits:

• One-stop shop solution for the Global Payroll Administrator
• End-to-end coverage of payroll business processes
• Checklist-like approach
• Configurable and personalizable
• Role-based and secure
• Modern and task-oriented interface

Working within the Global Payroll WorkCenter involves actions in four categories:

1. My Work
2. Links
3. Queries
4. Reports/Processes

The My Work panel includes the typical work for the administrator. For example, this section may include tasks that they intend to perform at the end of a calendar run—payee messages, missing bank accounts, retro triggers, relative triggers, active segmentation triggers, new hires, terminations, etc.

My Work enables the user to filter by department and customize their view to hide or show each column. Everything is completely personalizable, so the user decides which content to put in the panel.

Below My Work is the Links panel. Links are the common navigations that the administrator uses on a day-to-day basis and can be arranged in the order that the administrator uses them.

For example, for a global payroll administrator focusing on Australia business, the order may look like this:

• Payee Data
• Payee Data Australia
• Prepare Payroll
• Process Payroll
• Review Payroll
• Post Payroll Australia
• Post Payroll
• Single Touch Payroll

Like the My Work panel, Links are totally configurable for the user.

The third category is Queries. This panel is a query manager. Here, the user lists all the queries that they want. In addition to running queries, this panel provides analytics. Users can plug in analytics to the WorkCenter, and they will begin rendering.

The last major section within the Global Payroll Center is Reports/Processes. This panel enables users to add links to reports. Subsections may include Tax Reporting, Registers, and Year End Reporting. Administrators can add tasks to run reports every day or at the end of payroll runs. The user decides how this is set up.

Additionally, the entire interface for My Work, Links, Queries, and Reports/Processes can be personalized to the user’s preferences. Enabling and disabling links is easy.

For a demonstration of the Global Payroll Fluid WorkCenter, watch the video below.

Global Payroll COBOL Trace Utility

Historically, Global Payroll has operated as a COBOL engine where payroll errors were very difficult to debug. Debugging involves multiple iterations and code compilations, but the Payroll Log provided insufficient information for debugging.

The three benefits of the improvements to COBOL Trace Utility are:

• Better logging mechanism
• Reduction in troubleshooting time
• Faster issue resolution

The improved logging mechanism provides options for high level and detailed level traces. The user can trace with information about processing, and debugging becomes easier for customers and Oracle developers. Users can run Cobol without any trace, with a summary trace, or with a detailed trace. Ultimately, the improvements to the utility help reduce troubleshooting cycle time and speed up issue resolution.

For a demonstration of the Global Payroll COBOL Trace Utility, watch the video below.

Global Payroll Element Browser

The Global Payroll Element Browser helps both the administrator and the developer. Delivered in PUM Image 17, this tool provides four major benefits:

• A one-stop shop for GP Rules
• Facilitate rules maintenance
• Easy to navigate, search, and filter
• Powerful drill-down capabilities

Additionally, the Element Browser can assist users in comparing. The capability to compare rules elements is imported via Rules Packages and can compare in three ways:

• Across multiple effective dates
• With different elements of the same type
• Across databases

The result is a visual representation of differences in each situation.

For a demonstration of the Global Payroll Element Browser, watch the video below.