Making Changes to a Rule Program of a Workgroup

There may be times when you need to change the rules in the rule program associated with a workgroup. These rule changes could occur during the current processing period as well as retroactively. For example, you might need to go back in time to apply new rules to previously reported time. The time data as originally reported isn't different, but the way the data needs to be processed has changed. For this reason it is important to understand some of the implications of changing the rules in a rule program.

Understanding the Consequences of Rule Changes

The same logic that governs mid-period workgroup transfers applies to mid-period changes to rule program effective dates. For example, if the rule program changes in mid-period, the start and end dates of the period of interest must be adjusted and rules could be applied incorrectly. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you schedule rule program changes to occur at the beginning of a period whenever possible. If you absolutely must change your rule program in mid-period, you will have to override rules processing and manually enter the hours to be paid during the transfer period. Because the effect of mid-period changes to workgroup data is discussed in the section Making Workgroup Transfers, you should review the material in that section prior to modifying your rules. There are, however, some additional precautions you should observe when changing rules:

  • You should never make changes directly to rules themselves. This could result in incorrect results if you need to reprocess prior period time using the rule definitions that were valid in the prior periods. Also, rules are part of rule programs, which are used by workgroups, and reference TRC programs. So if you change a rule this change will have multiple impacts throughout the system.

  • Instead of modifying rules, you should do the following:

    • Create a new rule: modify the existing rule and save it as a new rule with a new rule ID, or create a new rule from scratch.

    • Insert a new effective-dated row in the Rule Program.

    • Remove the old rule from the new effective-dated rule program and insert the new rule.

    • If the effective date of the change is set to a prior period, data for prior periods will be reprocessed.

Note: You cannot reprocess dates for a time reporter in a workgroup prior to the effective date of the workgroup itself. In other words, if the workgroup effective date is 1/1/2006 you cannot reprocess dates prior to 1/1/2006. Similarly, you can not reprocess dates for a time reporter in a workgroup prior to the date that the time reporter was enrolled in the workgroup.