The Pay Element Authorisation and Acceptance options let you authorise and accept changes made to employee fixed pay elements so that they can be used in a payrun.

When a change is made to an employee’s fixed pay element (amendment, addition, or deletion), the changed details may need to be authorised before it is deemed to be valid and available for use in the system. In effect, pay element authorisation is the process of making live any changes to pay elements.

Until a change against a pay element is authorised, only operators belonging to the same user group as the person who entered the change can view the new details. Operators in other user groups are prevented from amending the same pay element before authorisation has occurred.

For the pending change to become live, the work must be authorised by a senior member of staff who belongs to the authorising user group (designated at operator level). The authoriser can either authorise the change or reject it, in which case all trace of it is removed from the system.

Once the change has been authorised, certain user groups may need to accept the new information by running the acceptance routine to make the change active for the accepting user group. Acceptance requirements are automatically generated by the authorisation process, indicating to each relevant user group that they have information to accept.

An additional safeguard has been introduced for the user group who control the payrun. A manual blocking process locks a control group of employees to ensure that no pay element changes affecting those employees are allowed into the payrun. With the lock in place, individual employees or pay elements may be released into the payrun at the discretion of the controlling user group. Once data has been extracted for the payrun, the lock can be removed and all pending pay element changes are accepted into the payroll view.

No Pay Element Authorisation

The majority of users do not require any pay element authorisation and acceptance. For these users, when a pay element is added, amended or deleted by any operator the change is effective immediately and all operators will be able to see the new details.

This requires pay element authorisation and acceptance to be switched off. To achieve this, all user groups must be defined as follows:

• Access Level = 3 (changes allowed, authorisation not required)
• Acceptance Flag = N (acceptance not required)

Note: If any user group has an Access Level of 2 (changes allowed, authorisation required) and/or the Acceptance indicator is set to Y (acceptance required), then Pay Element Authorisation and Acceptance is switched ON.

The following topics are covered in Pay Element Authorisation and Acceptance: