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 are 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 a 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

Units: is an optional field that allows for you to enter delimited unit numbers to further restrict the report. The values given will restrict the report to appointments with one of the given units as their home department.

Visualization: Visualization is an option drop down field that allows you to have visualizations of the data created in addition to the tables of data that will be generated by the report. The types of visualizations are as follows:

  • Donut: Creates a series of visual concentric rings, where the outer ring segments correspond to the chosen Types and the inner ring segments correspond to the sub types.

  • Pie: Creates a basic pie chart using data for the specified Types. Note that the pie charts do not include the specified sub types.

  • Line: Creates a line plot with lines for each type and sub type specified.

  • Bar: Creates a basic bar chart with a bar for each type and sub type specified.

  • Stacked Bar: Creates a stacked bar chart in one of two ways. First, if only Types have been selected with no sub types, each stack will have piece of the stack that represents the specified type. If a Type with Sub types has been selected it will show a stack of the Type and the Sub Type data. This visualization does not support mixing multiple Types with Sub Types.

Labels: Labels is a drop down field that allows you to specify whether or not the visualizations should be labeled with the total value of the data, or as a percent. Note that the option for percent is only implemented on Donut and Pie chart visualizations. To see percents on the others, consider the Normalize option below.

Normalize: This option applies to the visualization types of Line, Bar, and Stacked Bar. What the Normalize option does is use the data value of the data point nearest our starting date, and sets that data point to 100%, and then converts all the other data point values in the series to a percent relative to the starting point. This can be used to easily show you the relative change in demographics over time as previous data points will either be percents above or below 100%.

Reverse: The reverse option reverses the order of the data points in the Line, Bar, and Stacked Bar visualizations.