Friday Feature – Load Vacancies and Affect Salaries Flag

As we continue on our journey to discover the flexibility of the Affect Salaries flag when loading budget amounts, we come to the Load Vacancies perform-change option. (As you will remember, we have already covered the Percentage Adjustment and Load Salary Records from HR perform-changes options.)
The Load Vacancies option reads all of the positions, searching for periods of vacancy. It then calculates a monthly amount based on a daily rate using salary schedules for the fiscal year, taking into consideration any mid-year salary schedule changes. And, it lets you define a “vacancy date” if you want to load vacancies for particular pay periods. Nice!

Just like the Load Salary option that we discussed last week, this option is going to look to the Salary Schedule and apply the column you select to the vacancies that match your criteria in the budget model. Unlike the Load Salaries option, we are dealing with positions that are not being paid (thus a vacancy), so you are not going to have four options, distinguishing between paid amounts and projections, you are only going to have two options, because vacancies are always projections.

What you see here is the same screen shot we saw for Load Salaries. It is the Salary Schedule, and what you need to decide is which column you want to use.

Do Not Apply Budget Amounts in Salary Schedule – Use the salary rate columns from the salary schedule record.

Apply Salary Schedule to Projections Only – Use the budget amount columns from the salary schedule record.

Pretty smart! But, Escape Online doesn’t stop there. It knows which budget accounts have line items for vacancies that you have loaded previously. For example, in February, you load the Salary Rate, but in April, you find that there are going to be salary schedule changes so you want to load the Budget Amount.

When you run the Load Vacancies the second time and set the Affect Salaries flag to Apply Salary Schedule to Projections Only, all of the vacancies that you previously loaded will be modified to use the new Budget Amount! Of course, Escape Online will not change any vacancy amounts that you entered manually. But, it will recompute benefits and add any benefit accounts that don’t already exist (if you are set up to do that).

Brilliant!