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Do you ever have moments you wish you could see balances (including accruals and absence information) for specific employee(s) and for a specific date range all on one report? The wait is over!  The newly added Leave Activity Report will provide you just that. 

How the Report Works:

The report provides the leave balance as of the begin date entered, the leave balance as of the end date entered, and then all of the absences and accumulations that were entered and applied to the balance to show how the employee went from the begin balance to the end balance.  We used the applied date because that is the date the absence/accum truly affected the leave balance.  If I'm not using deferred absence posting and I enter a personal day for today for an employee who will be out a day next week, that employees personal balance in the system reflects the usage today.  So the report was setup to show this by using the applied date.  This employee's balance in the system as of today is lower by 1 personal day even though that day off is not happening until next week.  So if I run the report with an end date of today, it should show the personal day being removed from the balance.  If the report worked using the activity date, the report would show a different balance for the employee as of today (the personal balance would be higher by 1 day) and would not match what the system shows for the balance as of today.So our thinking was that the report would show the absences/accums that have been applied to the balance between the dates entered on the report.  The 'Activity' part of the report name was not intended to mean 'Activity Date'.  It was just meant as this is the leave activity (absences and accumulations) that caused the balance to go from the begin balance to the end balance.   We may also want to see what the team thinks about possibly changing the report prompts for Begin Date and End Date to be something like Show Balance as of Begin Date and Show Balance as of End Date.  There is a tooltip in place on the report fields that indicates this, but maybe that is not being seen by the users.

Custom Forms in USPS Public Shared Reports Library 

The Public Shared Reports Library includes various customized report definitions that you can download and import into the Report Manager grid in either USAS or USPS.  The reason for this library is to encourage ITC fiscal support staff to share customized report definitions with other state software users that have been proven helpful to their districts.  All shared report definitions are tested by the SSDT before they are added to the library.  You can easily access the library by clicking on the option under the Help menu in your instance.  

It will take you to the main reports library wiki page where you can click on a link to access either the USAS or USPS libraries.  Here is an example of the USPS shared reports library wiki page.

We recently added custom direct deposit and salary form templates under the 'Custom Form Templates' section of the library providing various form layouts you can choose from.  One of these formats could also be a starting point, allowing you to even further customize it to fit your needs.  If you need further instructions on how to customize a salary notice form, please refer to this month's 'Video Spotlight' on salary notices.  It provides tips and tricks on how to customize the form as well as how to import the form and generate salary notices.

Five Year Forecast: Review and Extract

It's Spring Update time! There are some helpful tools available in USAS to help with reviewing and extracting your forecast data. 

Review (reports)

Five Year Forecast Extract