Seniority System - Overview

The Seniority System is used to maintain and track employee seniority. Employee seniority is the amount of time an employee has worked for your site. With increasingly complicated collective bargaining agreements becoming the norm, it seems that an individual employee can have more than one seniority. Some customers for example, track full time, casual, and probationary seniority for each employee. Our seniority system has been designed with the flexibility to track multiple seniority amounts for each employee.

To make the maintenance of seniority as simple as possible, we created a process that will read data from our payroll system and update the seniority system with the hours or days that each employee has worked during specified pay periods. This process can access the time worked from storage banks maintained in payroll, or by reading through the year to date history file. This process will create seniority adjustment entries for each employee. Another process can then be run to update the employee's seniority with the total of these adjustments.

If you are not interested in duplicating the seniority history detail from your payroll storage banks, you can update your HR seniority directly without creating seniority adjustments. This can be done by running Load Seniority From Storage Banks Process. This greatly simplifies the seniority process by skipping menu options 2, 3, and 4 from the Seniority System Menu.

The Seniority System offers you several reports listing the employee's seniority by employee name, position, location, or seniority. In addition, there is an Application Report which lists all applicants for a specific posting in seniority order (applicants with most seniority first).

Employee seniority can also be used in the entitlement system. The Entitlement Creation Process will load employee entitlement records with the employee's current seniority so entitlement amounts can be calculated based on seniority. This is particularly useful for vacation entitlements when employee's entitlement amounts are often determined by seniority.

The two database items listed below must be created before using the seniority system.

Seniority Bank Codes are used to define different types of seniority. The types of seniority you want to track will likely be determined by your collective bargaining agreement. You may need to accumulate only one type of seniority, or track several. Some of our customers track full time and casual seniority. Depending on current employee status (full time, casual, or on probation), the employee's seniority will be made up of the full time seniority, just the casual seniority, or the total of both. While there are really three different seniority mentioned here, there are only two types, full time and casual. Seniority Codes determine how and if the seniority types are to be added together.

Seniority bank codes are used in the Create Seniority Adjustments From Payroll process to determine how to calculate seniority from your payroll(s). There are two types of seniority banks. Seniority Bank Type 1 will read through your payroll year to date history file and accumulate time from the specified storage bank pay codes. Seniority Bank Type 2 will accumulate time directly from the specified storage banks. Each seniority bank code can also have up to 15 payrolls attached. For each payroll you specify you can attach up to 10 storage bank codes. Help from payroll staff will likely be required in establishing the necessary storage banks.

Up to five seniority bank codes can be attached to each employee to determine what seniority types to accumulate for each employee. There is a process that will globally add seniority banks and codes to groups of employees.

Seniority Bank Code

• Enter a seniority bank code up to 10 alphanumeric characters. Search to view seniority bank codes. Leave this field blank and Enter key to exit.

Description

• Enter up to a 30 character description of the entered seniority bank code.

Type

• Enter the type of the seniority bank.
• Enter 1 to accumulate seniority from the payroll's year to date file.
• Enter 2 to accumulate time from payroll storage banks.

Pay Id

• Enter the payroll identifiers of the payrolls to accumulate seniority from. Search to view valid payroll identifiers. After you enter a valid pay ID, you will be taken to the second bank screen where you specify the storage banks.
• The Seniority Bank Database Additions screen lets you enter up to 10 storage bank codes that determine how the system will calculate seniority. For banks designated as type 1, the include/exclude lists of the specified storage banks will be referenced to determine what time amounts to include in the seniority calculation from the year to date history. For banks designated as type 2, the storage bank amounts will be accessed as part of the seniority calculation.

Storage Banks

• Enter a valid storage bank code. Search to view valid storage bank codes for the specified payroll.

Units

• Enter D if the specified storage bank accumulates daytime units.
• Enter H if it accumulates hours.

Seniority Codes are used to specify seniority types (as determined by seniority banks) should be included in a specific seniority amount. Up to five seniority codes can be added to an employee to determine their current seniority. Up to five seniority banks can be attached to each seniority code to indicate that the specified bank amounts to be added together to make up the employee's seniority. The following table illustrates how two seniority banks (Full Time & Casual) can be attached to seniority codes to produce three different seniority amounts.

You can manipulate the three seniority codes listed in a number of different ways to produce the desired results. The simplest is assign one to each employee depending on his or her status. Employees given the Full Time seniority code will have only their full time seniority reported. Employees given the Casual seniority code will have only their Casual seniority reported. Employees assigned the FT + CAS code, would have the total of their full time and casual seniority displayed.

Instead of attaching the code FT + CAS to an employee, you could attach two codes Full Time and Casual to achieve even greater flexibility. When you run the current Seniority Report without specifying any seniority codes, the system will calculate the employee's seniority based on the their current seniority codes (found on the employee's hire record). The seniority amount displayed on the report will be the total of all current seniority codes. Thus the seniority for an employee would be the same if he had the one FT + CAS code, or the Full Time and Casual codes. By having the two codes on an employee, you can specify, when you run the report, what seniority codes to include. By doing this you could get the employee's full time seniority on one report, and the casual seniority on another.

Seniority Code

• Enter a seniority code of up to 10 alphanumeric characters each. Search to view seniority codes. Leave blank and Enter key to exit.

Description

• Enter up to a 30 character description of the specified seniority code.

Type

• Enter 1 if this seniority code accumulates amounts from payroll's year to date history.
• Enter 2 if this seniority code accumulates amounts from payroll's storage banks.
• The contents of this field are not critical at this time. It will become more important when there are other processes created to generate seniority adjustment records. A seniority code can be set to accumulate both bank types (1 and 2) at the same time.

Days Per Month

• Enter the number of working days that make up a month.
• Seniority adjustments are entered using either day or hour units. With an 'hours per day' field also entered, the system can convert hours to days. To convert to years and months, the system must know the number of working days per month and year.

Days Per Year

• Enter the number of working days that make up a year.
• Seniority adjustments are entered using either day or hour units. With an 'hours per day' field also entered, the system can convert hours to days. To convert to years and months, the system must know the number of working days per month and year.

Bank

• Enter the seniority bank code(s) that you want the specified seniority code to accumulate. Search to view valid seniority bank codes.
• Once the seniority bank code and seniority code databases have been set up, you are ready to use the seniority system. All of the options necessary to maintain employee seniority are found under menu option 9 off the main menu.
• An attempt has been made to structure the seniority menu in the order that you should run its modules the first time through.

Each of the above menu options is described briefly below.

1. Employee Seniority Load Process

• Each employee you want to use the seniority adjustment creation process must have at least one seniority bank code on their most current hire record.
• The bank codes determine what type(s) of seniority will be maintained. Each employee should also have at least one seniority code indicating their current seniority.
• Instead of loading seniority banks and seniority codes manually one by one, you can run this process which will load groups of employees with these codes.

2. Create Seniority Adjustments From Payroll

• This process creates seniority adjustment records from the specified payrolls.
• The accumulation of these adjustments determines the employee's seniority. Run this process periodically (every pay period, month, or year depending on how often you want to update employee seniority). The seniority bank type determines how these adjustments are made.
• Skip the creation of adjustment if your seniority is already stored in payroll storage banks and you are not interested in duplicating the period detail in the HR seniority system.

3. Load Seniority with Adjustments

• This process will load employees' seniority with the total of their adjustments within a specified time period. While each employee can have many seniority adjustments for each seniority code, each employee can have only one seniority record for each seniority code which contains their current seniority amount.
• If you are not creating adjustments you can skip this step.

4. Employee Seniority Adjustment Menu

• This menu lets you create or modify existing seniority adjustments which will in turn affect an employee's seniority amount. Creating a seniority adjustment for an employee's seniority to date will be necessary if that information can not be obtained from payroll.
• If you are not creating adjustments, you will not need to use this menu.

5. Employee Seniority Menu

• This menu lets you create or modify existing seniority records for an employee. Under normal circumstances, however, employee seniority records would be created and maintained through the Load Seniority With Adjustments process.
• An employee's seniority is the sum of all the seniority code's bank adjustments. Lets say that for employee John Doe we have been accumulating two different types of seniority. One type or bank is called Full Time, the other Casual. We have set up a seniority code FULL + CAS (the total of both). For the first few months of 1995 John was a casual employee. As such, every period he accumulated casual seniority. At the beginning of period 506 John was given a full time job. At that time he began accumulating full time seniority.

See the following table for the amounts of the adjustments.

Employee 1

Because we set up the seniority code FULL + CAS to be the total of the both the CASUAL and FULL TIME banks, Johns current FULL + CAS seniority would be 40 + 100 days. For the seniority code FULL + CAS we told the system there were 21.6667 days working days per month and 260 working days per year. With these figures, the system is able to convert John's seniority to 0 years 4 months and 13.3 days.

6. Load Seniority From Storage Banks Process

• This process updates employees  seniority with the online storage bank balance from Payroll bypassing all the seniority adjustment steps. This assumes your seniority is stored in your payroll storage banks and that you are not interested in duplicating the seniority detail from Payroll into HR. If this is the case, run this process immediately following menu option Employee Seniority Load Process.