Creating Staffing Orders

This chapter provides an overview of orders and discusses how to:

• Create staffing orders.

• Define assignments.

• Review employee job and assignment cross references.

• View assignment transactions.

• View assignment rates.

Note. If you have installed Staffing Front Office and Pay/Bill Management, refer to the Staffing Front Office PeopleBook for information about how to work with orders and assignments.

See Also

Creating and Managing Orders and Assignments

Understanding Staffing Orders

A staffing order is a request for temporary or permanent workers. When you create orders and assignments in Pay/Bill Management, the system automatically generates projects, contracts, and employee job data with minimal data entry. Pay/Bill Management then leverages the functionality of the Project Costing, Contracts, and Time and Labor applications to streamline your pay and bill processes.

Pay/Bill Management shares the Order and Assignment tables and components with Staffing Front Office, providing seamless integration between these two applications.

This section discusses:

• How Pay/Bill Management uses profiles to create projects, contracts, and additional jobs.

• Rate elements and rate profiles.

• Order types.

• Orders and assignments.

• Temp to hire.

• Order processing.

• Credits and fall offs.

Using Profiles to Create Projects, Contracts, and Additional Jobs

Pay/Bill Management uses profiles to create projects, contracts, and additional jobs. Before you can create an order, you must set up these profiles. They drive many of the values that are set up on the related project, contract, and job record.

The profiles consist of:

• A contract profile, which establishes Contracts and Billing defaults for your orders and assignments.

• A project profile, which establishes Project Costing defaults for your orders and assignments.

• A rate profile, which defines the types of rates that are captured in the temporary assignments and maps them to time reporting codes (TRCs).

Note. In addition to setting up profiles, the setup of customers, contacts, employees, and non-employees is essential for creating orders.

See Also

Configuring Your PeopleSoft Pay/Bill Management System

Rate Elements and Rate Profiles

During implementation, you first define rate elements and rate profiles. The components consists of three pages:

• Rate Element: In the Rate Element component, this page is accessible if you have either Staffing Front Office or Pay/Bill Management installed.

• Details: In the Rate Element component, this page is only accessible if you have Pay/Bill Management installed (with or without Staffing Front Office).

• Rate Profile: In the Rate Profile component, this page is accessible if you have either Staffing Front Office or Pay/Bill Management installed.

Order Types

When you add an order in Pay/Bill Management, you must select the user-defined order type that describes the transaction. Because user-defined order types map to one of two system-defined order types, a temporary order is really a user-defined order type that's mapped to a temporary system order type, and a career order is really a user-defined order type that's mapped to a career system order type.

Career orders are requests for one or more people to perform work in a permanent capacity at a client of the staffing organization. Creating a new career order is similar to creating a temporary order, except for specific fields that pertain to the career aspects of the position, such as prospective fees.

Temporary orders are requests for contingent workers for whom the client has no need for permanent positions. The customer can request one or more people on the same order. Creating a new temporary order is similar to creating a career order, except for specific fields that pertain to the billing and payroll aspects of the position.

Project and contract profiles are keyed by user-defined order type (not by system-defined order type), providing added flexibility in project and contract creation, as well as in accounting and reporting.

System behavior and logic are driven by the system-defined order type to which a user-defined order type maps.

The order type also drives the automatic project and contract creation business logic when the order is saved. Career orders create contracts in which the contract lines use amount-based products and milestones billing. Temporary orders create contracts in which the contract lines use rate-based products and as incurred billing.

The system captures different data elements depending on the system-defined order type. Most of the information captured for temporary and career orders is the same, but depending on the order type a few different data elements must be captured for billing and payroll purposes.

Note. You can convert a temporary assignment to permanent by using the temp-to-hire functionality. For a temporary assignment, click the Permanent Hire button that appears on the temporary Assignment page. Click it to convert the temporary assignment to a career assignment indicating that the employee was permanently hired by the customer. The system actually does not covert the assignment, but creates a new one and associates it with the prior assignment. On the career portion of the assignment, the system then prompts you for a placement fee, billing schedule, and commission. After you enter and save this information, the system creates an additional assignment with the related activities and contract lines for the permanent placement.

Orders and Assignments

Staffing orders are requests from customers for contingent or permanent workers. Assignments are the placement of employees at the customer work site to perform the services requested in the order.

Orders

The Order component captures the main information for an order, such as the customer billing and worksite address, start and estimated end dates, and billing information.

Assignments

The Assignment component captures the details required to start an employee or non-employee on an assignment. Much of the information is populated from the order, such as start date, estimated end date, job code, and worksite address.

You can enter additional information or change the default information here. This represents your last opportunity to enter assignment details before the system creates the related project activity, contract line, and employee job record information that drives the pay and bill transactions.

Order Processing

When you save an order, the system creates these items:

• Project.

• Status row for the project.

• Contract with a Pending status.

• Project owning organization (if you configure Project Costing to use organizations).

When you save an assignment, the system creates these items:

• Activity.

• Activity status.

• Activity team.

• Project team.

• Contract line.

• Amendment.

  Note. The first assignment creates the first contract line and activates the contract. However, starting with the second assignment, the additional contract lines are added via contract amendments.

• Billing plan with a status of Ready.

• Revenue recognition plan with a status of Ready.

In addition, when you save an assignment, the system performs these actions:

• Creates a link between the project, activity, and contract line.

• Creates a contract level rate set for the contract line and project activity (for temporary assignments).

• Creates billing events with the billing dates and amounts (for career assignments).

• Sends an application message to HR to create a job record (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record cannot be reused and a new one must be created).

• Sends an application message to HR to add an effective dated record to an existing job record (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record can be reused but some job information changed for the assignment, such as the tax location code).

• Creates the employee time reporter data in Time and Labor (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record cannot be reused and a new one must be created).

• Changes the employee time reporter data in Time and Labor (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record can be reused but the workgroup or taskgroup changed).

• Creates a cross-reference between the employee job record and the project and activity (for temporary assignments only) in HCM.

• Sends the assignment pay rates to Time and Labor to populate the pay rate in payroll (for temporary assignments only).

This section discusses these areas of order processing:

• Career orders.

• Temporary orders.

• Temp to hire orders.

• Edits and amendments.

Processing Career Assignments

When you enter a career assignment, you specify the fee for the placement and how much to bill on specific days.

Because career assignments are direct hires, you do not bill the customer for the hours that an employee works. Instead, you bill a negotiated amount for finding the customer a permanent employee. Therefore the product associated with the contract line (assignment) is amount-based. The billing plan associated with the assignment uses milestone billing. By entering a billing schedule, you are creating events to trigger the billing for a specified amount or percent of the total negotiated amount on specified dates. If you previously set the product on the contract profile for this transaction to Billing Manages Revenue, the system does not create a revenue recognition plan. If the product is not set to Billing Manages Revenue on the contract profile, then the system creates a revenue recognition plan that is set to recognize revenue according to the billing schedule.

Processing Temporary Assignments

When you enter a temporary assignment, you bill on a time and materials basis for the hours that an employee works. Therefore, the product associated with the contract line (assignment) is rate-based. The system creates an as-incurred billing plan for the temporary assignments and creates an as-incurred revenue recognition plan.

For temporary assignments, depending on installation specifications, the system either generates a new job record in the HCM database for each new assignment or tries to reuse existing job records by comparing the fields specified in the assignment against the same fields in the employee's already existing job records.

As part of the installation options, you specify whether the system will try to reuse existing job records or whether it will always create an additional job record for each new assignment. Additionally, users with proper security access can override the option chosen in the installation options and force the creation of a particular job for a particular assignment.

Two check boxes on the Staffing Installation page enable you to define how the system handles additional job record creation: one controls the additional job records process for hourly employees, and the other does so for salaried employees.

If the system creates an additional job, it populates the job record with the department, company, tax location code, workgroup, taskgroup, and so forth from the values specified in the assignment.

Pay/Bill Management captures Job and Time Reporter information in the assignment to facilitate the creation of additional jobs if an employee hired in one staffing branch is borrowed to work on an order created by another branch. The new job record created may have a different HR business unit, company, department, pay group, or location code than the one in his or her original hire record.

Note. Do not use this feature as a replacement for employee permanent transfers. Transfers should be done in the HCM job component; the system will use the new employee job information as a default for subsequent assignment. Even if the employee is temporarily borrowed from one branch to another, you should seriously consider not creating an additional job and paying the employee out of his or her home HR business unit, company department, and paygroup and using the Project Costing sharing rules to share some of the cost and the revenue between the department that owns the order and the department that originally hired the employee.

Paying the employee out his or her home job (and HR business unit) has the advantage of W-2 requirement at the end of the year (if the two branches belong to distinct companies or legal entities within your staffing organization), as well as making employee job data maintenance in HCM easier because the employee will have less job records.

Remember that even when the installation options are configured to reuse employee job records and when the assignment job-related fields match those of an existing employee job record, the system may still create an additional job if that existing job record is already in use by another concurrent assignment. This system behavior is intentional to enable the performing of data changes in the employee job record for one assignment (for example, a tax location code change) without affecting an unrelated concurrent assignment.

When an assignment is created in the FSCM database, two application messages are sent to the HCM database:

Editing Orders and Assignments

Once orders and assignments are created, some of the fields become display-only and can only be changed in the appropriate pages in Project Costing, Contracts, and Human Resources by using the appropriate links in the Order and Assignment components.

Note. Changes performed directly in those applications are not reflected back on the Pay/Bill Management Order and Assignment components.

See Also

Using Enterprise Integration Points

Creating and Managing Orders and Assignments

Credits and Fall Offs

When you create a career assignment or you convert a temp-to-hire assignment, you charge a fee for the placement. You might also make guarantees regarding how long the employee will stay employed by the customer to earn your full placement fee. If this guarantee is not met, the customer may want part of the placement fee credited or refunded. This credit is called a fall off.

If you have both Pay/Bill Management and Staffing Front Office installed, the system can automatically create a fall off credit for a career assignment by simply clicking a button.

If you only have Pay/Bill Management installed, this button is not available, so if a fall off occurs and requires a credit, you must manually add a credit memo in the delivered Billing pages. You must provide the necessary reference information on these pages—such as the project, activity, contract, contract line, and billing plan—to have visibility to these credits from the Project Costing and Contracts pages.

Note. If you have Staffing Front Office installed, see the PeopleSoft Enterprise Staffing Front Office 8.9 PeopleBook for information regarding fall offs.

See Also

Placing Candidates on Assignments

Common Elements Used in This Chapter

Creating Staffing Orders

You use the same component to create both career and temporary orders.

Note. Pay/Bill Management and Staffing Front Office share the same Order component. However, certain pages and fields within pages only display depending on which of these two products is installed.

You enter order information using pages described in the Staffing Front Office PeopleBook.

See Also

Creating and Managing Orders and Assignments

Creating Orders for Career and Temporary Placements

Defining Assignments

You use the same component to create assignments for both career and temporary assignments; however, the fields on the Assignment header page vary based on the order type. These pages are discussed separately. In addition, the Assignments - Initial Payroll Setup page does not apply for career orders.

Note. Pay/Bill Management and Staffing Front Office share the same Assignment component. However, certain pages and fields within pages only display depending on which of these two products is installed

Refer to the pages described in the Staffing Front Office PeopleBook to enter assignments.

See Also

Setting Up Security

Creating and Managing Orders and Assignments

Placing Candidates on Assignments

Reviewing Employee Job and Assignment Cross References in HCM

Pay/Bill Management provides a component in the HCM database to inquire about the employee job record used to pay an employee for a particular assignment (and project and activity). This component facilitates employee job data maintenance when the data changes should only affect particular assignments. The information in the component is display-only.

Page Used to Review Employee Job and Assignment Cross References

Reviewing Employee Job and Assignment Cross References

Access the Assignment page.

Viewing Assignment Transactions

This section discusses how to view assignment transactions.

Note. This page is display only.

See Also

Reviewing and Adjusting Project Cost Transactions

Page Used to View Assignment Transactions

Viewing Assignment Transactions

Access the View Assignment Transactions page.

See PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 Project Costing PeopleBook, Reviewing and Adjusting Project Costs, Reviewing Project Cost Transactions

Analysis/Invoice

Description/Amount

Billing/Currency

Transaction Detail

Viewing Assignment Rates

This section discusses how to view assignment rates.

Page Used to View Assignment Rates

Viewing Assignment Rate Information

Access the View Assignment Rate page.

You can narrow your search by selecting values in the SetID, Customer ID, Vendor ID, Personnel Status, and Assignment Status fields. Click Search to populate the table with assignments based on your search criteria.