Best Practices For Standard Imports

Summary

This process will cover the standardized data sets that should be captured with any client file upload. The data falls into two main categories, and several scripts sets within those categories. Initial upload scripts and Ongoing upload scripts.

Requirements:

Initial and ongoing script files will import different sets of data – for example initial load of the employee records grabs all employees of Active clients, thereafter the ongoing script grabs all active and any employee termed in the last 3 months. Further details of the differences are as follows:

Company_initial : All Clients, active and termed not specifically excluded.

Company_ongoing : Smaller subset of initial data – but the filter criteria do not change as the data set is small and Client termination data needs to be captured.

Contacts: Primary contact and address information for Clients main division (Division 0)

Employee_initial : All employees of All Clients (Active and termed)

Employee_ongoing : All employees of Active Clients that are active or have termed in the last 3 months. If the client is utilizing the Workers’ Compensation claim system, they may want to broaden the parameters to include termed clients.

Employment_initial/ongoing : All employees of Active Clients that are active or termed in the last 3 months.

Employee Deduction Vouchers_Initial : All deductions from checks in the last year. This can be filtered for specific deduction codes.

Employee Deduction Vouchers_ongoing : All deductions from checks in the last 21 days. This can be filtered for specific deduction codes.

Locations: All Physical locations, marking primary location as such and all other locations as ‘Alternate’.

Voucher_initial : All payroll voucher data for employees that have collected checks with an amount greater than 0 in the last 365 days. More historical data can also be uploaded, but the standard initial set is the last 365 days – uploading larger historical data sets will require these sets to be broken down into acceptable size chunks.

Voucher_ongoing : All payroll voucher data for employees that have collected checks with an amount greater than 0 in the last 21 days.

Pricing Imports : While pricing data can be imported, this is not recommended due to the inherent issues involved in data mapping. A recommended best practice is to not import pricing data, but to enter the data into ClientSpace on first re-price.

Process: Work with the client to find out their needs and concerns from a data perspective. Insure these are met through client side scripting of the Payroll system, then test the data to insure accuracy and completeness.

Client Concerns: Clients may wish to exclude certain client numbers in the payroll system (internal clients) for security purposes, or they may wish to filter deductions such as child support or non-benefit deductions such as allowances or personal expenses. This filtering can be accomplished using the ‘WHERE’ clause in the script files.

Testing:

Prior to kicking off an automated import process, test the data coming out of the client payroll system to insure accuracy, some data validation could include:

Count of Active Clients in the payroll system vs. what is being generated on the flat file.
Count of employees by Client, status, company etc.. to insure accuracy.
Validate any values being used in ClientSpace lookups to insure proper code / decode pairings.
Count and sum total of gross pay for payroll vouchers for a specific paydate, client or employee.
Count and sum total of employee / employer deduction amounts for a given paydate, client or employee etc...

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Best Practices For Standard Imports

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