PeopleSoft 9.2 : Enhancements That Are Common To Multiple Applications

Oracle continues to deliver enterprise-wide features that enhance your ownership experience and help you run your business more efficiently and profitably. With the release of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management and Enterprise Learning Management Release 9.2, Oracle delivers: 

•  PeopleSoft Search 
•  Pivot Grids
•  Embedded Help
•  New PeopleSoft Online Help Solution
•  PeopleSoft Continuous Delivery Model
•  PeopleSoft Update Manager
•  iPad Certification
•  PeopleSoft Interaction Hub
•  PeopleSoft Talent Management 9.2 to HCM 9.1 Integrations

Payroll for North America Business Process Flow

1. Setup HRMS Tables
2. Setup Payroll Tables
3. Maintaining Employee Payroll Data
4. Actual Payroll process

• Pre-sheet Audit
•    i) Create Paysheets 
• Pre-Calc Audit report
•     ii) Pay calculation  -> Precalc and Final
• Pre-Confirm Audit report
•     iii) Pay confirmation
•     iv) Pay Unconfirmation
•     V)Pay Unsheet

5. Post to General Ledge, Pay Third Parties, Pay Taxes
6. Running Reports

Process Flow of Time & Labor

PeopleSoft Adoption Roadmap

Oracle and PeopleSoft Development Announce the General Availability of PeopleTools 8.53 [links fixed]

This latest release of PeopleSoft PeopleTools provides a new level of usability and productivity within PeopleSoft applications and enables PeopleSoft customers to manage their total cost of ownership for PeopleSoft applications. While PeopleTools 8.53 is the enablement platform for the next planned release of PeopleSoft applications (release 9.2) it also delivers value to customers with existing PeopleSoft deployments. This release fundamentally improves our applications at many levels. The user experience is on par with or better than other applications on the market today. We've also introduced important improvements in how customers deploy, scale, and update our applications with features like virtualization and the PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM).

Here are some of the major improvements in this release:

• Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search – Provides secure, free-text search within PeopleSoft applications across multiple objects and multiple applications for a more streamlined search-driven navigation approach.
• Related Actions – Enables end users to take relevant actions on objects within the context of transactions rather than using lengthy traditional menu paths.
• Activity Guides – Provides for the deployment of guided business processes, which facilitate a variety of activities from self-service to administration.
• Pivot Grids – Offers self-service, real-time, multi-dimensional analytics embedded into PeopleSoft applications providing end users with the actionable information needed to make decisions.
• WorkCenters – Consolidates user tasks, exceptions, alerts, links, reports, and queries into a single, secure, role based “command center” that can be personalized and configured by end users for increased productivity.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Improves use and support of CSS and enables customers to easily configure their PeopleSoft system to reflect organizational branding (e.g. color, graphics, etc.).
• Oracle Private Cloud Deployments of PeopleSoft – Enables multiple PeopleSoft application instances to be consolidated on Oracle Exalogic, providing high capacity and performance, dynamic scaling and provisioning using Oracle Virtualization.  This also dramatically improves system management, patching, and maintenance.  All of this reduces total cost of ownership.
• Secure by Default - As part of Oracle Secure by Default initiative, PeopleTools 8.53 will request passwords for delivered accounts necessary for system initialization and disabling other sample accounts. We will also be delivering a salted SHA-1 hash for PeopleSoft passwords. The salted SHA-1 hash enhancement will not affect upgrades.

Early testing with this release has already generated enthusiastic reviews, and we have had positive feedback from customers at conferences and corporate visits.  We look forward to similar favorable responses as more customers upgrade.
There is much more in this important release.  Please see the PeopleTools 8.53 Release Notes, available on My Oracle Support.
Documentation and training is also available here:
PeopleTools 8.53 Documentation Home page
PeopleTools 8.53 Installation Guides
PeopleTools 8.53 Upgrade Home page

Federal Tax Changes for 2013

There is much recent discussion of the 'fiscal cliff'.   Will the Bush tax rates expire as of 12/31 or will Congress achieve a compromise?  Either way, what will PeopleSoft provide for 2013 withholding and OASDI employee tax rates in the interim?
News of legislation passing one or both houses of Congress and getting signed into law isn’t enough by itself for us to deliver tax table changes.  The appropriate government agency has to turn enacted legislation into regulations and employer instructions before we can determine what product modifications might be required.  For example, Congress might pass and the President might sign legislation making all sorts of tax changes, but until the IRS turns it into actual employer withholding changes, there’s nothing we can provide.

It’s the same situation if the clock runs down to December 31 and Congress does nothing which, in turn, may trigger numerous tax increases.  Until the IRS actually issues new employer withholding calculation instructions for 2013, there is nothing we can deliver to customers in response to Congress having decided to do nothing.

What is the PeopleSoft position?
Withholding tables. Income tax rates are scheduled to increase on January 1, if Congress does not act before then to keep the rates at the current levels. It's unclear whether the IRS will release the 2013 withholding tables without congressional action.

PeopleSoft Payroll for North America position:  We will leave 2012 U.S. withholding tax calculation values in place until the IRS publishes guidance/instructions for wages paid on or after 1/1/2013.

Supplemental wage withholding rates. The withholding rate on supplemental wages in excess of $1 million during a calendar year will increase from 35% to $39.6% on Jan. 1, 2013, if Congress does not act before then to keep the income tax rates at current levels. The supplemental wage withholding rate will increase from 25% to 28% on supplemental wages of $1 million or less in a calendar year if Congress does not act to keep the income tax rates at current levels.

PeopleSoft Payroll for North America position:  We will leave 2012 U.S. supplemental withholding tax rates in place until the IRS publishes guidance/instructions for wages paid on or after 1/1/2013.

Social Security payroll tax cut. The “payroll tax cut” has temporarily lowered the Social Security withholding tax rate on wages earned by employees in 2011 and 2012 from 6.2% to 4.2%. Currently, there is no legislation in Congress that would extend the payroll tax cut beyond Dec. 31, 2012, but there has been some recent talk in Washington about either extending the cut or providing some other payroll tax stimulus.

PeopleSoft Payroll for North America position:  In Tax Update 12-F we are changing the employee Social Security tax rate back to 6.2% based on information currently on the Social Security website, and in the absence of any pending Congressional action to extend the payroll tax cut.

Should Congress take action to extend the payroll tax cut (or make some other modification to the 2013 employee Social Security tax rate) after Tax Update 12-F has already been delivered to customers, we can (a) provide  customers instructions on how to manually adjust the previously-delivered 1/1/2013 table entry to re-instate the payroll tax cut, and, depending on the timing, (b) deliver the updated table entry in the late December special posting and in Tax Update 13-A.

How to process Person of Interest(POI) in NA Payroll?

Here's how you need to setup POI for paying through NA Payroll :

POI – “Pension” (Pension Administration) or “Other Payee” (used for retirees) should be in a Company that has the Tax Reporting Type of 1099 on the Company Table.
POI – “Student Refund”- must be in a Company that has the Tax Reporting Type of Non-Employees or None on the Company Table. No tax filing will be done for this type.
Not all POI are allowed to be paid. only below POI types can be paid:

Pension Payee – Is used for Pension Employees who use our Pension Administration System.
Other Payee – One such usage is for use for Retirees who do not use our Pension Administration system.
Student Refund – Is used for Student Refunds.
so ..

If an employee is person type "EMP" he MUST be in a W-2 or W-2PR company. If they are retirees in a 1099-R company, they must be a person type of "POI".
and
For POI to work properly in North American Payroll,you must be at least on Tax Update 06C and HR bundle #8.

Is there any way to set up a new POI type to use for Ben Admin processing or is this limited to certain types of POI's like the Payroll question was?

The biggest difference in 9.0 is that a CWR cannot be processed using Benefits Administration and one of the POI types can. As a CWR, you can set them up using Base Benefits, but if you try to set the Benefits System to Ben Admin you will get an error. In 9.0, (perhaps this is also in 8.9 now) there is a POI Type of Other-Payee which originally was intended to allow a Person in this POI type to be paid from Payroll for North America. Since then, this POI Type has been "enhanced" by Oracle to allow processing by Benefits Administration as well (there is a "fix" posted on CC for it).

The initial requirement here was to move them out of the employee population but still allow them to be processed for Benefits purposes using Ben Admin. CWR did not meet that need, but the POI did.

As to the statement about adding "whatever you want for POI's", in the Red Paper released by Oracle for v8.9 Person Model there is a caution about creating new POI types that require a Job record as this may require the need to modify PeopleCode or Batch processes. The perfect example of that is the "fix" delivered to allow the Other-Payee type to work with Ben Admin. In that fix, you will see that PeopleCode was modified to allow this to work.


**`PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll for North America does not process payroll for contingent workers.
CWR - Contingent Worker:
A person who provides services to the organization and who does not have a legal employee relationship with the organization.
The relationship of a person who provides services to another entity under terms specified in a contract on a non-permanent basis. Contingent workers include independent contractors, temporary workers, and leased workers. The exact definition of what defines a contingent worker is left to the customer since each country has different rules. You will want to make the determination based on your regulatory requirements. Each Contingent Worker's relationship must have a distinct EMPL_RCD.

The employee and contingent worker relationships represent your workforce and are the main focus of the business processes in PeopleSoft. Most of the processes that are designed for employees are also available for contingent workers with the following exceptions:

Payroll for North America
Plan Salary
Plan Careers and Successions
Variable Compensation

**Just a note - although oracle says that you cannot pay contingent workers through payroll for north America, it is in fact possible. The system will not generate a paysheet for them, but you can override and manually create a paysheet.

For that reason it is always recommended that you set the pay system to other for CWRs. In addition to that, setting the pay system will also eliminate some of the pay specific fields that are required, like paygroup. this will ensure that you do not need to setup dummy config for them.