Concept: Effort Certification for Payroll

U.S. government sponsors require effort certification to validate reimbursement for payroll expenditures that fall within the scope of their funding agreement.

You can create effort certification for a specific worker or a population of workers for a given period. Workers, or authorized individuals, must approve the costing or change the percentages of their time distribution to represent actual time worked. After you certify an effort, you can use the effort certification report to justify a worker's payroll allocations.

To run effort certification, you must have posted payroll journal lines.

Business Process

When you initiate an effort certification run, Workday routes the effort certification through the Effort Certification
business process for review and approval. If you want a manager in the worker's organization assignment to review the effort certification, select this routing option in the effort certification type you use. Workday recommends that you configure this business process according to your effort certification requirements.

Adjusting Payroll after An Effort Change

When workers or reviewers change effort allocations that affect costing, a payroll administrator must update payroll accounting to match the certified effort. You can update payroll accounting with either a payroll accounting adjustment (PAA) or pay accounting reallocation (PAR), but you can't mix PAA and PAR on the same pay results: Use only PAA to update pay results previously updated with PAAs, and PAR to update pay results previously updated with PARs.

Automating PAA after An Effort Change

Because PAA and PAR are mutually exclusive, don't integrate PAA initiation into your Effort Certification
business process if you plan to use PAR. The instructions below apply if you rely exclusively on PAA to adjust payroll results.

You can automate PAA initiation by integrating PAA into the Effort Certification
business process. To set it up:

Use full worktags in the effort certification type.

Configure the worktag usage for effort certification to include all worktag types used in your payroll.

Define the effort certification changes that impact costing by accessing the

Maintain Change Reason Codes for Effort Certification and Payroll Accounting Adjustment

task.

Add Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments for Effort Certification
as the last step in the Effort Certification
business process definition.

When the Effort Certification
business process generates a PAA, the calculation:

Includes earnings components only.

Doesn't include employer costs or deductions. To adjust these costs, you must manually add the pay components to the PAA.

When the effort change initiates a PAA on a retro period pay, Workday:

Considers the retro period on the effort certification lines and displays only the retro period pay that you adjusted through the effort change on the PAA.

Associates the retro payroll adjustment periods with the effort periods in the payroll accounting lines and effort certification report.

If you don't want effort certification to initiate PAA automatically after an effort change, omit the Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments for Effort Certification
step from the business process definition, and run PAA manually after the business process completes.

Certifying Effort for PARs

Workday can calculate efforts for completed PARs. Before initiating the effort certification process, you should:

Remove the Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments for Effort Certification
condition step from the Effort Certification
business process to prevent the business process from routing effort change requests automatically to a PAA, because you can't run PAA and PAR on the same pay results.

Consider adding a To Do
step to the business process definition to direct effort change requests to the Assign Costing Allocation
business process for processing with PAR.

Run the

Pay Accounting Reallocation by Status

report to ensure that there's no active PAR at the time of initiation. Complete any outstanding PARs before proceeding.

During the effort certification process, continue to periodically access the:

Pay Accounting Reallocation by Status

report to check for active PARs and the potential for introduced effort changes. If a PAR is started while an effort report is in progress, and the PAR is:

Not complete: Wait for the PAR to complete.

Complete: Run the

Pro Forma Effort Certification

task to check for the difference between the current calculated effort and pro forma results. If there’s a difference, cancel the in-progress effort report and run effort certification again.

Recertify Effort Certifications

Pro Forma Effort Certification

, and other effort certification reports at any time to monitor for changes to prior effort calculations introduced by PARs.

Effort Certification Status Report

to monitor on-going effort progress.

After the effort certification process completes, access the

Recertify Effort Certifications

task to check for and recertify any obsolete certification results.

If a worker or reviewer changes effort allocations on the certification, maintain costing allocation as needed and initiate PAR manually to ensure that the worker's payroll matches their certified effort.

Pro Forma Effort Certification Report

A pro forma effort certification report offers you a preview of your effort certification results based on payroll accounting actuals or obligations. You can use it to plan for payroll costing or accounting adjustments before running the effort certification.

Recertify Obsolete Effort Certifications

Some payroll accounting changes can cause effort certifications to be obsolete. Workday enables you to recertify effort certifications that might be obsolete as a result of changes in:

Award

Certified amount

Certified percentage

Cost share fund

Grant

Number of lines

Payroll worktags