Payroll Debbie

Payroll Debbie performs the role of an always-present assistant to the Administrators. She works in the background and performs routine jobs including:

• Running Data Feeds, for example, before a given pay run, or at the start/end-of-tax-tear.

• Restarting paused reports when the pause has expired.

• Bulk or individual changes to Pay Items ahead of a given PayRun. For example an annual salary review.

• Sending notifications to Administrators or Employees to remind them to perform any assigned tasks.

• Routine maintenance.

Traditionally, these jobs would be done manually or initiated manually (where automation is available), by a payroll administrator. To allow for possible delays or errors in completing the job, careful tracking of all this activity was required, and often managed in ad-hoc using sticky notes, coloured markers, whiteboards etc..

Payroll Debbie greatly reduces this burden by initiating these jobs automatically, under the overall supervision of the payroll administrator. Payroll Debbie’s basic mode of operation is to spread processing across Clients and Companies in a measured fashion by:

• Waking up multiple times a day to scan for work.

• Tracking previously completed work.

Payroll Debbie’s status and planned activity can be viewed and updated at .

Scanning for Work

Each time she wakes up, she scans for work to do according to several rules:

Types of Scan

Scope	Schedule	Examples
Host	Daily	System maintenance tasks.
Client	Monthly	Generate invoices.
Client	Daily	Per-Client maintenance.
Client	Hourly	Send notifications. Daily Data Feeds which specify Time Of Day, see Daily Data Feeds which specify Time Of Day below.
Company	Daily	Start-of-tax-year Data Feeds, End-of-tax-year Data Feeds, Daily Data Feeds which do not specify Time Of Day. Disable leaver access.
Company	Pay Schedule Prompt window	Pay run Data Feeds. Scheduled changes to Pay Items.
Company	Pay Schedule Approval window	(Re-)do Payroll Debbie-runnable pay runs.
Company	Pay Schedule Finalise window	Approve and complete Payroll Debbie-runnable pay runs.

Tracking Completed Work

Payroll Debbie tracks each item of completed work. The tracking is done using either:

• Properties of objects stored in a database such PayRunReports (for Data Feeds) or PayRuns (for Pay Schedules).

• Atomic locked values stored in Consul, which expire after 24 hours, and may not survive a restart. Used when work items are idempotent and of short duration (c.f. the well-known visibility timeout problem in distributed queueing systems).

This tracking is designed to operate across multiple hosts and so allow multiple instances of Payroll Debbie to share work as the system is scaled.

Handling Errors

Note

Human administrators are still required to monitor the results of Payroll Debbie’s actions, and in particular to perform error recovery as needed.

Debbie-runnable Data Feeds

Data Feeds are used to update paiyroll® using data from external sources. They can be run manually, or by Debbie. In either case, the results can be seen at My Data Feeds .

If required, use the Dry run setting on the Data Feed definition to disable this.

You can see which data feeds Payroll Debbie plans to run in the next 7 days, and when, at .

Daily Data Feeds which specify Time Of Day

Some Data Feeds fetch data which is only updated at a given time of day. paiyroll® supports these by allowing a nominal start time of day to be set, and Payroll Debbie will only attempt to run the data feed after the nominal start time. (The display at shows the nominal start time).

For these Data Feeds, the days on which runs are allowed must also be set with reference to the Pay Schedule Terminology.

Since Payroll Debbie actually runs the data feed some time after the nominal start time, and will also retry failures as needed after a delay, the combination of nominal start time, allowed days and schedule should be chosen to allow for this. For example, say:

- The Pay Schedule has `Prompts begin` set to 2 and `Prompts end` set to 1
- The `Run pattern` is set to "Prompt days only"
- The `Start time` is set to 16
- The next Prompts start date is 12-Apr

Since the Prompt window is 1 day long, and Payroll Debbie cannot start before 4 PM, this leaves only 8 hours till the Approvals window in which to run the feed.

Debbie-approvable PayRuns

Pay runs are defined by Pay Schedules and created by workflow. Typically, the workflow has an approval step which requires human intervention. However, this manual step is undesirable in some cases so, if the Auto-approve setting on a Pay Schedule is set:

• During the Approval window, Payroll Debbie will created (or re-do) a scheduled PayRun. Note that any custom or on-demand pay runs are ignored (handling them is the responsibility of the administrator).

  It is assumed that any needed updates were previously applied, either manually or using a Data Feed (possibly automatically, see Debbie-runnable Data Feeds and Future-dated Pay Item changes).

• During the Finalisation window Payroll Debbie will set the PayRun as Approved, and initiate the post-approval Workflow steps.

If required, use the Auto-approve setting on the Pay Schedules to disable this.

Future-dated Pay Item changes

Debbie can be used to apply a predefined script of changes to Pay Items in time for a given PayRun. To create a script:

• Select a Company if you have more than one

• Click Add against the required PayRun under Pay Item changes.

• Select the workers and Pay Definitions which are to be changed. This allows the scope of the changes to be quickly defined:

  • Click >> to select all workers or Pay Definitions

  • Select one worker or one Pay Definition with a single click and then clicking >. Double-click a worker or Pay Definition is another short-cut.

  • Each selected Pay Definition causes a new tab to appear where interactive changes can be made.

• Once workers and Pay Definitions are selected, Click each tab you want to work on. You can make the required changes by any combination of:

  1. Interactive changes on each Pay Definition tab by editing the values in the cell(s) and clicking Update

  2. Download a CSV file, which can then be modified. When ready Upload the changes.

  3. Copy’n’paste from an external source such as a spreadsheet and clicking Update

• Update the page to save the changes.

Reviewing Debbie Pay Item changes

A nice feature is that after you have added any changes, you can review or modify them in Payroll Debbie

You can see the number of upcoming changes as a number badge on the update icon next to a PayRun. Click on update next to a PayRun to see the actual changes that will be applied or to make further edits.

Debbie will apply the script during the Prompt window ahead of the PayRun. After the script is applied, the results can be viewed.

After 90 days, the script will be deleted. If required, use the Delete button on the script to remove it before it is applied.

Note

Download a script to manually apply using the Upload wizard facility on Pay Items.