Our last post discussed payroll history challenges and your data warehouse.
Today, you’ll learn about challenges involving Employee Job History
You know that it’s not enough to know what your job counts and job titles are today. You need to know what they were last month, last quarter, and last year.
This data presents several key challenges:
- Changes made after the effective date.
UKG Pro allows you to back date employee job changes. For example, Jill was promoted on July 1st, but Jack forgot to enter the promotion until August 1st. This creates two issues. First, your headcount has changed. So, reports issued as of July 1st are now incorrect. Next, you paid Jill as a manager even though she was a VP through July. So, you’ll need to make a journal entry or payroll adjustment. These adjustments will complicate your data warehouse. There is no technical solution to this problem. Your team needs to track back dated changes and fix the poor processes that create them.
- Multiple changes made on the same effective date.
Let’s say that Jack wasn’t a total slacker. He changed Jill’s title on Time. But he forgot to change the department. So, he makes another change, also effective July 1st. You’ll now find two job changes on the same effective date. When you create your data warehouse, you only want to look at the last change made. - Your data warehouse expects a star schema and slowly changing dimensions.
A standard data warehouse will expect several slowly changing dimensions for employee data. For example, title, organization levels, annual salary and supervisor. Employee Job History doesn’t provide this. Instead, it gives you the values for all those fields on a given date. It won’t tell you which field changed on that date. You need to compare records to see what actually changed.
Our basic data warehouse addresses these issues. We can also train your team in how to work with these challenges. If you’d like to discuss these options, contact us.