HR Suite

In this article, I will explain the background & setups needed for Retro-Pay Functionality.

What is retro pay?

Retro as a term is related to Past. Hence RetroPay is a payment made for an event of past.

What is an example of retro pay?

Say in the month of Feb06 you were given "Cost Of Living Allowance" for a value 200. For some reasons the element entry did not take place correctly in Feb06 and the element entry was done for a value of 150 only. Let’s say now you are in May06, and you realize that you have been  Short-Payed. You will in this event inform your payroll department to make the necessary backdated adjustment to that element entry.

The challenges are:-

1. Feb06 period is already closed. Hence you can not rerun the payroll for the month of February06 again.

2. You do not wish to capture that Element Entry in May06, as that can cause audit issues, and also can have tax implications as this is an Earning Element.

Can we still go backwards to capture the element entry in Feb06(by date tracking)?

Yes, although with we need to do certain extra setups, and also we need to run some RetroPay processes. I will try to explain all of that in the context of Oracle Payroll.

Operational steps prior to Oracle Apps 11.5.10

I think prior to 11.5.9, the payroll manager would do below steps:-

Step 1. Make a backdated change to your Element Entry.

Step 2. Include your assignment into an assignment set.

           This assignment set would have included a list those people for which retro-pay must be run.

Step 3. Run the retro-pay process for that assignment set.

Hence you were reliant upon your Payroll Manager to remember to include your assignment in Step 2.

Now in 11.5.10 onwards, the "Step 2" is no longer needed if you have implemented Advanced RetroPay.

In this article, I will be explaining the setups needed for Advanced RetroPay process.

What are the setups we need to do to implement advanced RetroPay?

You must refer to Metalink Note 216951.1 for the purpose. However, I would like to explain the setups in a bit more details here.

Setup 1. Navigate to a screen named "Functional Area Maintenance".

Ensure that the desired pre-installed triggers are visible as below.

First find the screen name "Functional Area Maintenance"

Query on "INCIDENT REGISTER" in the Name Field.

Setup 2. Include your Business Group name in the "Business Group" tab, in the Functional Area Maintenance screen.

Setup 3. You need to enable your legislation too, in the same “Functional Area” screen.

This will be the country code. I guess different countries have different rules to handle taxation of Retro pay (for example if you make backdated changes in previous tax year should payroll taxation effect your allowances of previous year or this year?)

Setup 4. Making a backdated change is an Event in Oracle Payroll. But there are various other events that can take place in Oracle HRMS/Payroll. Hence you will need to tell Oracle Payroll which events should trigger Retro calculation.

Example : Your business requirement can be that a backdated change to an element triggers retro-pay calculation. However your business requirement may not require recalculation if person is given backdated promotion/grade change.

By means of event groups, you tell payroll which list of events can initiate a retro pay process. Event group has a type, which in this case will be Retro.

For this Demo, I have included the following events in group "XX ANIL TEST"

Setup 5. When the event i.e. Change of Element Value takes place, Oracle registers that event in a table named PAY_PROCESS_EVENT.

Entry in this table is created by means of a Trigger. I will possibly write another dedicated article to explain Triggers in Oracle Payroll.

Anyway, we must ensure  that HRMS triggers that record Element Entry Value changes are Enabled.  I also suggest that you read Metalink note 216951.1

You need to ensure that the trigger Enabled and Generated checkboxes are checked.

In case you were do retro-pay for say Grade/Position change, then relevant trigger for Position must be enabled.

Setup 6. In case you wish to feed the results of RetroPay calculations into a different Element, then you can specify that by specifying that in Recalculation tab in Element Entry.

OK that's it about the setups for Advanced RetroPay.

Now some Q & A, read these if interested to drill further.

We have RetroPay by Element and also Advanced RetroPay. Can we use both Functionalities together?

I think you should use just one of those. The advanced retro-pay internally creates the Assignment Set automatically.

In case of older Retropay process, payroll admin staff had to create the Assignment set manually.

Which process do we run to initiate RetroPay processing for our backdated changes?

That there can be various "Event Groups" defined(some for proration and some for Retro[event group type being retro].

All the changes pertaining to all Event Groups would have created entries in PAY_PROCESS_EVENTS.

Retro Notification report will filter the events applicable to RetroPay and will populate PAY_RETRO_ASSIGNMENTS and  PAY_RETRO_ENTRIES .

What are the processes that one needs to run?

Step a. You will first run "Retro-Notifications Report (Enhanced) - PDF". This will read the records from PAY_PROCESS_EVENTS.

This process will insert eligible records into PAY_RETRO_ASSIGNMENTS and  PAY_RETRO_ENTRIES .

Step b. Run process Retropay (Enhanced). This process will do the require calculations to differential payments.

Note: This functionality is not yet available for all the legislations, but most major one's are supported.

Anil Passi

Add comment