Friday Feature – HRA Items

Last week, we started our series on HRAs by giving you an overview of HRAs. This week we are going to look at HRA Items, the detail form for routing changes.
Let’s quickly review what we learned last week: HRAs allow for approval routing and notification of proposed changes including employee separation, new employee, changes to position, etc. When all approvals are granted and the item is posted, the changes are applied to the records as defined in the item. Each HRA item can have a different workflow, defining approvals and notifications.

Now, what exactly is an HRA item? An HRA item is a form where you can enter data that you want written to a permanent Escape Online record after you have received approvals. For example, the Employee Demographic Changes HRA has many of the same fields as the first tab of the Employee record.  You enter the data you want to update, route for approvals, and then when approvals are given, Escape Online writes your data to the Employee record.

In the end, it is exactly the same as if you had gone into the Employee record and directly entered your data. The HRA simply provides approvals and notifications BEFORE the changes are written to the permanent record.

Here we have a Demographic Change Form (one of the HRA Items that is currently being used at a customer). Notice how only the Last Name and Previous Name fields have data. That’s because you only enter what you want to change! So, if the employee got married AND moved, the address would be filled out too. It’s that simple.

But what if you want something a little more complicated, like an employee separation? We have several sample HRA Items — employee separation, employee payroll separation, position change, position end, and position recruitment — which can be customized to fit your needs.  They all use the same concept: enter the data you want to change, answer a couple of questions to determine the logic for the item, send for approvals, get approvals, and update the database.

You can see how these items can work together to vastly improve your workflow. And, indeed, they do in a feature we call HRA packages, where an employee separation automatically creates an employee payroll separation and, depending on your logic, automatically creates a position change, position end or position vacancy HRA item.

Pretty awesome! Stay tuned for the next installment on July 11 (we will be closed on July 4), when we walk through an employee separation HRA package!