Payroll Report Builder

Overview

The Payroll Report Builder is a tool for generating custom reports based on payroll data for the college. Specifically the tool allows for the creation of time series representations of the data with custom grouping options. The tool offers a great deal of flexibility in reporting and grouping of data, and as such it is possible to create reports that do not make sense or is otherwise misleading. It is imperative that those using this tool are familiar not only with the data, but with the conventions and practices used and implemented by this tool.

Conventions, Terminology, and Field Descriptions

Conventions

This page uses many WSU codes whose meanings can be found here. Additionally many of the fields described by the tool allow for multiple delimited entries. In keeping with CBS conventions our delimiter is the semi-colon ";".

Terminology

Area: An Area is a high level organizational unit within the college, e.g. Area 3, 30 and 41.

Type: Type, short for Employment Type is a classification of employee appointments such as Faculty, Exempt, Hourly, etc...

Sub Type: A Sub Type is a child category of an appointments employment type. For instance the Faculty type may have a sub type of Tenured, or Non-Tenured. Sub types may be predefined or custom created.

Unit: A Unit is an organization unit with an area of the college and often corresponds to a department. Units are designated by 4 digit codes

Accounts: An account is a combination of Budget, Project, Fund, and Sub Fund as defined by the WSU financial system.

Field Descriptions

Starting: The starting field expects a date value which will act as the right end point in our time series. In other words, the starting point is the most recent point in our sample, with the series being constructed moving back in time starting at the specified value. In the event that we are not making a time series the starting value will correspond to our lone data point. It is important to note that when the report is ran the starting value is translated to the ending date of the pay cycle that contains that date.

Interval: When creating a time series the Interval value determines the distance between each point of sample data. For example Interval=1 would create a series where there is one pay period between each data point, i.e. 10/15/2014, 10/31/2014, 11/15/2014, etc... With Interval=2 you would have a series that looked like 10/15/2014, 11/15/2014, 12/15/2014.

Samples: Samples is the number of samples to include in the time series, including the starting point.

Areas: Areas is a collection of check boxes that allow you to customize which area of the college to pull appointments from. Specifically this is related to the appointments that are paid on accounts in the specified areas.

Types: Types is a collection of check boxes that allow for you to specify the types of employee appointments to include in the report.

Sub Type: After selecting an employee type the option to create an option Sub Type will appear in the form of a drop down that will contain any predefined sub types, as well as the option to create a custom sub type. When you select to create a custom sub type a new text input field will be created under the drop down. To define a sub type use the following format.

Name:title1;title2;title3

For example, the Faculty sub type for tenured faculty for area 30 would look like the following:

Tenure:0104;0105;0126;0207;0209;0210;0230;0270;0280;0290;0294;0310;0372;0373;0374;0380;0394;0404;0407;0574;0581;0584;0597