Designing Overtime Calculation Extensions
Oracle Projects provides a template Overtime Calculation extension. You can use the template to understand the extension, and then make appropriate changes to meet your business needs. Before modifying the extension, read the following essay and related case studies on implementing overtime: Tracking Overtime and Premium Labor Costs.
Implementing Your Company's Overtime Calculation Extension
If you decide to use automatic overtime calculation, you can implement your company's overtime policies using the template Overtime Calculation extension as a starting point.
Your technical staff can customize the Overtime Calculation extension to accommodate the overtime rules that your business uses.
We recommend that you complete the following steps to implement your company's Overtime Calculation extension:
- Define and document your overtime policy
- Use your documented overtime policy to determine the kind of implementation data you need to drive automatic overtime calculation. This implementation data may include compensation rules, expenditure types, labor cost multipliers, and an overtime project and tasks
- Define the implementation data necessary to drive automatic overtime calculation
- Have your technical staff code your overtime policy in the Overtime Calculation extension
- Test your implementation data and Overtime Calculation extension to ensure that it correctly implements your company's overtime policies
A few additional notes about implementing the Overtime Calculation extension are:
- Define all overtime expenditure types with an end date so that timecard clerks cannot enter overtime through the Pre-Approved Expenditures window
- Base automatic overtime calculation on weekly overtime rules. Oracle Projects is designed to process weekly timecards; all expenditure item dates of a timecard must be within the expenditure week ending date of the timecard. Therefore, automatic overtime calculation is most easily performed based on weekly overtime rules
How the Overtime Calculation Extension Processes Overtime
The Overtime Calculation extension template follows these steps to process overtime:
- Determines all employees and corresponding weeks which may include new overtime to process. The Overtime Calculation extension calculates and creates overtime only for employees with timecards processed in the run of Distribute Labor Costs that calls the Overtime Calculation extension. These employees and weeks are identified by the request_id of the straight time expenditure items that are costed before the Overtime Calculation extension is called.
- Sums the hours required to calculate overtime for identified employees and weeks. The standard Overtime Calculation extension sums the total hours for the week and the total hours for each day of the week, relying on the timecard entry validation rule that all labor expenditure item dates must be within the expenditure week ending date of the timecard.
- Calculates overtime hours based on the hours worked, the employee's compensation rule, and other criteria you might specify. The standard Overtime Calculation extension calculates overtime for an employee and a week based on the employee's compensation rule using the three compensation rules described in the case study. See: Implementing Overtime Charged to an Indirect Project.
- Creates overtime expenditure items for each type of overtime for which the employee is eligible. The overtime item is charged to the overtime project and appropriate overtime task that is specified in the Overtime Calculation extension using the overtime expenditure type defined for the employee's compensation rule. The expenditure item date is set to the week ending date. The expenditure item is assigned the labor cost multiplier that is associated with the overtime task to which it is charged.
The extension creates a new expenditure for each person and week that has new overtime items. The new expenditures are assigned to an expenditure batch created in the Overtime Calculation extension. The expenditure batch name is based on the Request ID number, and uses the prefix "PREMIUM". For example, an expenditure batch run under Request ID 1205 would be named PREMIUM - 1205.
- Lists employees with new overtime items on the Overtime Calculation Report.
After the Overtime Calculation extension has completed, the Distribute Labor Costs process costs the new overtime items.