How to check for Future Dated Transactions when entering a Termination in Employee Central

[EduMartins]

Overview

In this blog post I'll share how we can achieve one very common requirement from customers using Employee Central: How can we check if an employee has future dated transactions recorded in his/her Job Information section when you need to record a Termination.

This is a requirement that is critical for a lot of integrations between Employee Central and Payroll systems and/or Benefits systems, the implication is that these systems should not receive records with transactions after the termination effective date, specially events that can change the Employee Status like Return to Work, or events that can change their eligibility for Benefits like a Job Change or Promotion.

There is currently a Customer Influence request for this change that got already 18+ votes (link below):

Display message needed to provide notification of future dated transactions

The specific description of the requirement from the Customer Influence request is:

"Give a brief description of what business problem your suggestion helps to solve  

1. 
   

   When a termination is being entered in EC, display a message if there are future dated transactions which asks to clean it up. (alternatively, make this possible via business rules and we can make our own message, currently business rules can't identify if there's a future dated transaction)

   
   


2. 
   

   Have a notification and/or message during imports which state which records have future dated transactions. This would be beneficial for both terminations and regular effective dated record imports. Terminations require a subsequent clean-up activity, and other loads would need to be validated to ensure propagation occurs correctly."

   
   

Solution - Proposed Configuration

The way I found to check for these future dated events is to create a business rule using a function called "Has Job Change Event For Period ()", but the trick is that this function will only become available if you activate the Calibration Alerts feature under Manage Calibration Settings.

Recording

I created the video below with a step-by-step on how to configure this solution, a simple way to meet a "big" requirement:



Conclusion

This solution can be used not only when you are recording a Termination but also for any other events as needed. The only "down side" of using this solution is that the function uses the Event Reason as a criteria, so you will need to add one condition for each Event Reason you need to check in your rule, but still it should be a low maintenance solution as customers don't keep creating new Event Reasons all the time, or they shouldn't be at least 🙂

Thanks for reading/watching, I hope this helped 😉

[garladinne]

Nice blog. Useful tip. Thanks for your video steps 👍

[EduMartins]

Thanks! 🙂

[ags3033]

Hi there, Thank you for the video and information about checking for future dated transactions.  Is there a way that I can us the termination date to check for future dated issue date of non-recurring payments?  I couldn't make the connection between the job information termination and non-recurring payment issue date (since there isn't an event date on the payment).  Any suggestions?

[JaninaHornig]

Thank you Eduardo for taking the time to come up with this suggestion.

There seems to be some confusion with regards to this particular rule function, based on support tickets we've had recently. I would like to add some more context, and hopefully answer some of the open questions out there.

Rule function "Has Job Change Event For Period" was implemented for calibration/promotion scenarios, which is why it is tied to the calibration settings. Its original purpose was to detect whether an employee has a promotion in the specified period.

The rule function parameter is an event reason - and I don't know why, because what it internally does is fetch the event assigned to this event reason, and then search the subject user's Job Info records for this event. This is why it will return 'true' if the subject user has a Job Info record with the same event, but a different event reason... hence the rule function name "Has Job Change Event For Period". It is sufficient to set this function up with one event reason per event that you want to detect in an employee's history (past or future).

We will improve the rule function's description text to make this a bit clearer. The function's parameter really should have been an event rather than an event reason.

I hope this helps.