SYMPTOM:

I created a Report Design grouped on ‘Period ID’. The Report displays data in the desired grouping order as long as I extract it against (or, taking employees from) any one particular Attendance Class. But once I extract the Report on multiple Attendance Classes, I observe that the grouping order goes haywire, i.e., the same group (Pay Period) seems to repeat.

I want to ensure that data against a particular Pay Period number (an ordinal sequence) be grouped altogether across all Attendance Classes. For instance, I want all the data belonging to the first Pay Periods of the respective Attendance Classes to be presented under the same group, and similarly all for the second Periods, the third Periods, and so on. Grouping the Report in terms of the Period ID does not offer a sufficient solution.

CAUSE:

In PERKS, a ‘Period’ is an entity by itself against which the attendance of employees is recorded (and paid for). Hence, every Period must maintain its unique identity irrespective of its name, order and Attendance Class it belongs to. Consequently, the first Pay Period named ‘January 2000’, which relates to employees of an Attendance Class ‘A’, will have its Period ID different from that of a Pay Period that is also named ‘January 2000’. But it may be related to the employees of another Attendance Class "B".

Hence, if the ‘Period ID’ is made the parameter for grouping, data that belong to different Periods can’t be presented under the same Report group irrespective of whether they have identical name (e.g., ‘January 2000’) or sequence.

Therefore, grouping a Report Design in terms of ‘Period ID’ will suffice only as long as the Report is extracted against one Attendance Class at a time.

RESOLUTION:

You need a Head of Pay with the appropriate content, i.e., the Sequence Number of the Period (in fact, consider it as a non-payslip type HOP) to be used as the Grouping parameter for your Report Design.

Do the following for each of the Pay Structures:

Create a Head of Pay (HOP), for example ‘PRDORDER,’ with the following attributes:

Keep the other attributes at their default settings. Specify some formula for this HOP (such as: any numeral, like ‘1’), and save (you will, soon, understand the objective behind this step).

Modify the freshly created HOP (say, ‘PRDORDER’), and enter its formula as "Prevvalue(PRDORDER)+1". It is a self-referencing formula, which clarifies why we have saved the HOP with a dummy formula. Now, save your HOP definition.

If you have closed any Period(s), then sequentially open them, and enter the Period Sequence Number (such as, ‘1’ in ‘January 2000’, ‘2’ in ‘February 2000’, ‘3’ in ‘March 2000’, and likewise) for all the employees. The convenient way to perform this is described below:

Select the Payroll / Heads of Pay / Calculated & Overridden option. Select an Attendance Class and a Pay Structure. Make the entry for the employee appearing in the first row. Press the button captioned Fill Below. This will ensure that data get entered for all the employees under the selected Pay Structure. Choose the Save button. Repeat the process to enter the Period Number considering all the Pay Structures under the Attendance Class.

Now, close the Period using the Payroll / Set Current Periods option. Repeat the process for all the historical Periods and the current Period as well. Please note that you need not generate the Payroll of the employees for the closed (i.e., already generated) Periods again.

You can now use this HOP (‘PRDORDER’) as the grouping parameter in your design. This will group all the data belonging to the same Period sequence across all the Attendance Classes for any Pay Period. Select your desired design from the Company / Special / Report Writer option. From the Edit / Page Layout menu option, set the newly created HOP (‘PRDORDER’) as the Group Condition. Save your design.

MORE INFORMATION

You may look for the Help Topic titled ‘Automatic Prorata Calculation’ in the Online Help.