Overview
Each regular employee at the University of Michigan is assigned a leave program based on the benefit family of his or her job classification. Then, each leave program is associated with specific plans (e.g., Vacation, Paid Time Off).
Leave activity occurs for each of an employee’s leave plans, which includes leave usage, accruals, and adjustments. To prevent leave usage from being over-reported, departments verify that their employees have accurate leave activity recorded in M-Pathways. This should occur regularly, generally after each payroll or on a quarterly basis.
Employees with the TL LEAVE ACCRUAL VIEWERS and TL TIME ENTRY USERS roles can view Leave Data in M-Pathways. The overall review process can be described as follows:
- Regular review: Run the Leave Activity by Department report or a public query to review leave balances.
- As-needed investigation: If there are leave balance discrepancies, review an employee’s leave program, leave plans, and history of leave activity on the three Leave Data pages in M-Pathways. Then, if necessary, review the Job Data pages to see impacts to an employee’s Leave Data.
When viewing Leave Data, it is important to consider the following when leave accruals are added to employees’ balances, and when leave usage is deducted from employees’ balances:
- Leave Accruals:
- Monthly employees have leave accruals added on the first of the month, with the same effective date.
- Biweekly employees have leave accruals added according to the "Leave Accrual Schedule"
on the University Payroll Web site. This is normally the first Wednesday of the biweekly pay
period that includes the first of the month.
Note: The effective date of the biweekly accrual is back-dated to the start of the pay period. This means that the accrued hours can be used for any date in the pay period even though they are not added to the employee's balance until the first Wednesday in the pay period.
- Leave Usage: Employees have their leave usage for a payroll deducted from their balances when
the associated payroll is confirmed (completed).
- Biweekly employees’ leave balances reflect leave usage on the Wednesday before the associated, biweekly pay date.
- Monthly employees’ leave balances reflect leave usage on the same day the associated Gross Pay Register report is available, according to the "Monthly Paydates" schedule on the University Payroll Web site.
Business Process Methods
The four methods involved in reviewing Leave Data are:
- Leave Activity Reports – Review leave activity for all employees in a Department ID, or for one employee.
- Public Query – Review leave balances for the members of a static group, or for one employee.
- Leave Data Pages – Investigate leave balance discrepancies by viewing detailed information about an employee’s leave program, plans, and activity.
- Job Data Pages – Review Job Data transactions for impacts to an employee’s leave accruals and balances.
These four methods are detailed below.
Business Process Details
1. Leave Activity Reports
There are two types of Leave Activity reports in M-Pathways that display detailed leave activity for a specified period of time:
- Leave Activity by Department:
- You can run this report for one or more Department IDs at a time, but only for one type of pay frequency at a time. This is because employees with different pay frequencies have their leave usage reported and processed at different times.
- Leave Activity by Employee:
- You can run this report for one employee at a time.
To learn how to run these on-demand reports, refer to the Run Leave Reports Step-By-Step Procedure.
2. Run a Public Query
A query is a method of directly retrieving data from M-Pathways. The queried data can be viewed/printed on a grid in M-Pathways, and can be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Queries that can be run by multiple people based on their Role are considered "public."
- Most public queries are designed for use by M-Pathways timekeepers. Some of these queries are applicable for reviewing Leave Data, which is a category of Time and Labor data.
- A Group Id (static group) is required to run a query for multiple employees at once.
- Static groups are groups of employees maintained in the Time and Labor module by departmental timekeepers.
- If your departmental timekeeper does not have a static group because the timekeeper does not report time into M-Pathways, only the third query in the following list can be run.
- The specific queries for reviewing leave balances are:
- MTL_LVE_BAL_GRP: Provides leave balances for the members of a static group, and includes all of the group members’ leave plans.
- MTL_LEAVE_BAL_BY_PLAN: Provides a static group’s leave balances and detailed activity for a single leave plan (e.g., Paid Time Off only).
- MTL_LEAVEBY_PLANTYPE_GRP: Provides one employee’s leave balances and detailed activity for a single leave plan.
- To learn how to run a query, refer to the Run an Existing (Public) Query Using Query Viewer Step-By-Step Procedure available on My LINC. The procedure is the same whether running a public query to review leave balances or other types of Time and Labor data.
3. Viewing Leave Data
Three different pages provide view-only access to effective-dated information about an employee’s leave program, plans, and activity:
- Employee Leave Programs: Identifies an employee’s leave program with eligibility dates for associated categories of leave plans.
Navigation: NavBar > Navigator > Time and Labor > Setup Leave Data > Employee Leave Programs
- Employee Leave Plans: Identifies each of an employee’s leave plans with effective dates and associated benefit plans.
Navigation: NavBar > Navigator > Time and Labor > Setup Leave Data > Employee Leave Plans
- Employee Leave Data: Displays a detailed history of leave activity for each of an employee’s leave plans.
Navigation: NavBar > Navigator > Manager Self Service > Time Management > Leave Data > Employee Leave Data
- The fields on the Leave Data pages are described in the Employee Leave Data – Field Descriptions document on My LINC.
4. Viewing Job Data
In many cases, Human Resources (HR) transactions that change an employee’s Job Data also impact the employee’s Leave Data. For example, a decrease in effort results in a decrease in some leave balances and accrual rates.
- The Job Data pages may be viewed in M-Pathways to review these HR transactions. The navigation to these pages is:
NavBar > Navigator > Workforce Administration > Job Information > Job Data
- A Field Description document named Job Data for Timekeepers is available on My LINC, and is applicable to people who review Leave Data.
Documentation on the My LINC Website
The Learning and Information Center (My LINC) is available from the Wolverine Access Gateway under University Business. Also, My LINC can be accessed directly at: http://maislinc.umich.edu