Creating Action and Reason Categories

This chapter provides an overview of action and reason categories and discusses how to:

• Reference action and reason codes.

• Use action and reason categories.

• Set up HR action and reason categories.

Understanding Action and Reason Categories

A pension is often based on the entire work history of an individual. An employee’s service, consolidated hours, and consolidated earnings are determined by using action and reason code histories, which analyze data from different points in an employee’s career. For example, employees on disability or on certain types of leaves may require service adjustments or hours and earnings generation.

You incorporate these requirements into your plan rules by referencing the action and reason fields in employees’ job histories.

Referencing Action and Reason Codes

The PeopleSoft Enterprise HRMS system comes with a basic set of action codes. Pension calculations do not assume anything about the relevance of particular action codes. This is because your company may use these codes differently from another company, or you may modify the delivered codes. Therefore, the pension functions that look at an employee’s action history, service and consolidations, require that you specify the codes that impact pension calculations.

Your company may have any number of action codes that are treated the same in specific situations. For example, all hire and rehire actions might fall into a single category for service purposes. To eliminate the tedious work of identifying all significant action and reason combinations in the consolidation and service pages, you set up categories for codes that are treated similarly.

If an action is treated differently depending on the associated reasons, you can specify which reasons belong in which category. For example, paid leaves of absence are treated differently from unpaid leaves.

Using Action and Reason Categories

This section provides an overview of the pension job stack and discusses how to use action and reason categories with pension functions.

Understanding the Pension Job Stack

Although many action and reason events are important to pensions, others are not. For example, assignment completion is unlikely to impact pensions. Even events that may seem to be significant for pensions may turn out to be irrelevant. For example, a transfer action is not itself significant, but the new location or job may be.

At the beginning of every pension calculation, the system identifies all the codes you include in action and reason categories and creates a pension job stack. This is a job history that excludes all the events that have irrelevant action and reason codes.

Then, when you calculate service and consolidations, the pension functions further filter the job stack to include only the action codes referenced in a function's parameters.

Using Action and Reason Categories with Pension Functions

Three Pension Administration functions reference action and reason categories: service, consolidated earnings, and consolidated hours.

Using with Service

Service calculations break an employee’s career into segments, based on the action and reason history.

For the elapsed time and hours equivalence methods, indicate which categories of actions and reasons start and stop service. You can apply minimums and maximums for particular statuses.

Hours counting service uses the segments only for applying minimum and maximum accruals. The action and reason history does not control service accruals because service is based on the actual hours worked, as recorded by payroll.

Using with Consolidated Earnings and Consolidated Hours

Earnings and hours consolidations use action and reason histories to:

• Generate earnings and hours for specified statuses.

• Identify partial periods based on events occurring during the period.

• Identify hire and term periods in order to annualize earnings and hours from those periods.

Earnings consolidations use action and reason histories for two other purposes as well:

• You can determine the partial period fraction, the portion of the period during which the hours and earnings are attributed, using the action and reason history.

• If you calculate earnings based on compensation rate, you can exclude pay earned during a particular status.

Setting Up HR Action and Reason Categories

To set up action and reason categories, use the Job Event Categories (ACTION_CATEGORY) component.

This section provides an overview of categories, lists the page used to set up action and reason categories, and discusses how to create the action and reason categories.

Understanding Categories

You can only reference action and reason codes through categories. Even if a category consists of just a single action code or action and reason code combination, you must create the category in order to reference the code in service and consolidation rules.

Page Used to Set Up Action and Reason Categories

Creating the Action and Reason Categories

Access the HR Action/Reason Categories page.

Action	Select the HR action codes to include in the category.
Reason	Select the specific reason codes to include in the category, or select All Reasons to include all the reason codes in the category.