Tracking Compensation and Benefit Changes
It is inevitable that your business rules for compensation and benefits will change over time. Element definitions, link definitions, and element entries are all datetracked. This lets you track the changes to your compensation and benefit policies without losing any of your historical employee information. The history of your definitions remains in place for validation and reporting, and for future calculations of back pay.
After you have defined and used an element, you can make the following changes:
- Change a required input value to be not required
- Alter the sequence in which input values appear in the Element Entries window
- Change the input value validation rules for minimum, maximum, lookup, or formula
- Change your specification of which input values create Database Items. Note, however, you cannot remove Database Items if they are used in any formulas or QuickPaint reports.
You cannot remove existing input values nor add new ones if you have created any entries for the element.
Link rules always control the entry of element values at the time of entry. Changes to link rules affect existing entries in different ways, depending on your use of Standard links and Hot Defaults. After you have used an element you can make the following changes to the link rules:
- Change the input value defaults and validation.
- These changes affect all new entries. Changes to hot defaults affect existing entries. Changes to validation also affect existing entries when you update the entry.
- Date-effectively end all of the rules that apply to an element and define a new set of rules, which are effective from a later date. For example, suppose you have defined eligibility for a company car based on grade. Following a change of policy you must now define eligibility based on job.
- You will not be allowed to end the link if any nonrecurring entries exist at the date you want to end the rule. You must delete existing entries before you end the link.
- You can end the link if recurring entries exist. Any existing entries will be ended, automatically, when you end the link.
- Change the qualifying conditions of age and length of service that employees must meet to be eligible for the element.
With DateTrack you can also make future-dated changes to your information safe in the knowledge that these changes will not become effective in the system until the correct date.
In this way you can use your compensation and benefit information to plan changes ahead of time; analyze the impact of these changes; adjust these changes and generally smooth out the workload that is often associated with major changes in compensation and benefits policy.
See Also
Managing Change Over Time
