Determine How Sign Offs Are To Be Processed

1. Determine if a transaction request is assumed to be approved or denied. This decision also affects whether an employee sign off is removed or retained.
   • With the Assume Approval method, it is assumed that any transaction request that an employee makes will be approved by the supervisor. So if an employee enters a clocking request and then signs off on the time card, they are assuming that the supervisor will approve the request. Therefore, if the supervisor does approve it, it should not remove the employee’s sign off. But if the supervisor modifies, deletes, or denies it, it should remove the employee’s sign off. For more information, see About Assume Approval for Requests.
   • With the Assume Denial method, it is assumed that any transaction request that an employee makes will be denied by the supervisor. So if an employee enters a clocking request and then signs off on the time card, they are not signing off on that particular clocking. If the supervisor approves the request, it is a change to the employee’s time card and the sign off should be removed. But if the supervisor denies the request, the sign off should not be removed. For more information, see About Assume Denial for Requests.
2. Determine the transaction maintenance window.

   Determine if you want to use a one-day or two-day transaction maintenance window. This window is used when evaluating transactions related to an employee sign off that are at the beginning of a new pay period but could affect the previous pay period. For more information, see About the Transaction Maintenance Window.

   Example: If the pay period ends on Sunday, the window allows transaction maintenance through Monday or Tuesday.

About Assume Approval for Requests

This section explains the effect on the Employee Sign Off when using the Assume Approval method.

The following table assumes that the employee has signed off.

*A request can be a clocking, calendar, or adjustment request that is added, modified, deleted, or approved after the employee has signed off.

When the Assume Approval method is used, a message appears during the "Review Requests Report" step of the pay period close process, stating that any unhandled requests will be denied by the system and the affected employees' sign offs will be removed.

About Assume Denial for Requests

This section explains the effect on the Employee Sign Off when using the Assume Denial method.

The following table assumes that the employee has signed off.

*A request can be a clocking, calendar, or adjustment request. The request can be new (submitted after an employee signed off) or existing (submitted before the employee signed off).

About the Transaction Maintenance Window

The transaction maintenance window determines how transactions in the first two days of a new pay period affect the employee sign off in the current pay period. Due to certain calculation and posting rules, transactions which fall on the first or second day of a new pay period could be pulled back into the current pay period and affect time there. Therefore, these transactions need to be accounted for when determining whether employee sign off needs to be removed during an edit to a transaction.

This only applies to transactions that have not yet been assigned to a Pay Group Instance. For example, an Adjustment will always have a Pay Group Instance, so it never uses the transaction maintenance window. But clocking records are not assigned a Pay Group Instance until they are paired up by the calculations process.

Example: Your pay period ends on Sundays and you have the indicator set for a two day window. An employee signs off on the current time card. They clock in on Tuesday morning (this is actually a new pay period but you have not run the close pay period process yet, so it is still the future pay period). The employee does not have a corresponding out punch to that in punch so it is not yet tied to a Pay Group Instance, since according to rules configuration, that punch could end up being tied to either the current or next pay period. If a supervisor deletes or modifies that clocking, since it is not tied to a Pay Group Instance and it is within the two day window, the employees sign off is removed.

By contrast, using the previous example, if you set the transaction maintenance window indicator to one day, the sign off would not be removed. However, if the clocking occurred on Monday morning, the sign off would be removed since the shortest window is a one day window.

Exceptions to Sign Off Removal

There are two exceptions to the removal of employee sign offs.

• A duplicate clocking entered after the employee signs off

  If the system determines that a clocking is a duplicate, the employee sign off is not removed.

• Automatic adjustments

  If an automatic adjustment is updated by the calculations process, the employee sign off is not removed.