Concept: Using Effective Dated Service Dates in Absence

Effective Dating in Service Dates enables you to define an effective date when making service date changes. To take advantage of this feature within time off calculations, we recommend that you review your calculations that reference service date fields and consider updating any that don’t make reference to

Recent

Service Date

as of Period Start Date

or

Recent

Service Date

as of Period End Date

. You can use service date fields within accrual calculations and time off plan eligibility.

Using non-effective-dated service date fields can result in unexpected impacts for rehires or workers who had their service dates adjusted during their employment. When using service date fields in time off calculations within instance value calculations (IVCs) such as

Worker: Continuous Service Date

, the calculations return the latest top-of-stack service date change, regardless of the calculation being evaluated in a previous period that had an earlier service date value. The result of this behavior is that when modifying a service date value, the change takes effect across both future and historical periods. This is particularly problematic when a worker is rehired or acquired from another organization and their accrual history needs to reflect the service date history and not just the latest service date.

To address this behavior, Workday delivers alternative IVCs that accurately reflect the historical service date changes for a worker within time off and accruals. These IVCs evaluate the service dates as of the period start or period end date instead of returning the latest service date change. These IVCs have a naming convention of

Recent

Service Date

as of Period Start Date

or

Recent

Service Date

as of Period End Date

.

Review your current calculations that reference service date fields, paying particular attention to eligibility and accrual configuration. If you’re unsure where you’re referencing service dates in your configuration, you can use the

View Instance Value Calculation (Workday Owned)

report to view the IVCs and then check their usage to see where they’re referenced.

Take note when you find references to service dates in your calculations and include them in your testing scenarios. Check whether the calculation uses the recommended IVC that evaluates the effective date of the service date field as of the period start date or period end date. Some commonly used service dates within Absence are:

Non-Effective Dated IVC	Recommended Effective Dated IVC
Worker Continuous Service Date	Recent Continuous Service Date based on Period Start Date Recent Continuous Service Date Based on Period End Date
Worker Hire Date	Recent Hire Date as of Period Start Date Recent Hire Date as of Period End Date
Worker Seniority Date	Recent Seniority Date Based on Period Start Date Recent Seniority Date Based on Period End Date
Worker Time Off Service Date	Recent Time Off Service Date Based on Period Start Date Recent Time Off Service Date Based on Period End Date
Worker Union Seniority Date	Recent Union Seniority Date Based on Period Start Date Recent Union Seniority Date Based on Period End Date

If you're using calculations within Absence components in your tenant that don't reference the most recent service dates, validations in the

Tenant Analyzer

enable you to identify them. On the

Tenant Analyzer

, you can navigate to the

Calculations

row under the

Area

column of the

Absence

Validation

tab to view components that need your attention. Review the components in the

Instances Failing Validation

column to find out where you can replace existing calculations with instance value calculations that reference the most recent service date.

When making changes to calculations, it’s important to consider the impact to any worker’s time off balances. Consider effective date changes as well as a review of any balances persisted by the processes for calculating and recalculating balances. See:

Concept: Guidelines for Storing Time Off Balances
Recalculate Balances for Workers

Ensure that you test calculations that make reference to service dates when adopting the Effective Dating in Service Dates feature. In particular, consider these test scenarios:

Rehired workers.
Terminations.
Workers with changes to their service dates, both retrospectively and future-dated.
Midperiod hires.

When using the Effective Dating for Service Dates feature, you must enter an effective date when initiating a service date change. If you populate the effective date with the initiation date, you won’t see a change in the behavior of your calculations that reference service dates.