Variable Pay Eligibility Fields in Design Worksheet

[JoannaRo]

Dear Experts,

I was wondering if you can explain to me the purpose of having Eligibility Fields in Column Designer for Variable Pay programs. I have reviewed SAP notes and the implementation guide, but I have not found anything specific to this area:

What is the use case of having such a column in a worksheet?

I have an EC-integrated template and eligibility rules through business rules.

Kind regards,

Joanna

[xavierlegarrec · Accepted solution]

Hi @JoannaRo 

In VarPay these fields allow us to replace the "Manager Eligibility Rules" which is the exact same thing than the regular Eligibility Rules in Comp that allow us to include or exclude someone based on UserID. See the design with these Eligibility fields that can be made to save time when running mass update job and remove the need to click on "Apply" the rules before launching worksheets.

That being said this type of exclusion doesn't make much sense in Varpay and I've personally never used them in any of my implementations.

Why ? because we already have all we need in Plan Setup > Settings > Employee Central Settings with the following two options: 

The Global Eligibility Rule above does the exact same thing than the Manager Eligibility rule (except it always includes - we cannot switch it around like Manager Eligiblity rule to exclude) AND adds the possibility to define a date that would be different from the program end date or the template EC effective date which the Manager Eligibility rule doesn't allow (it always uses the EC effective date).

And the Eligibility Rule for Employee History Records allows us to fine tune which records we want. And if no record is retrieved for someone then that person will never be added to the worksheet.

In summary, these eligibility fields could work but there is no need for them technically.

Hope this helps you understand better

Xavier

[JoannaRo · Accepted solution]

Hi Xavier,

Thank you for your reply. I agree that the Global and Employee History eligibility rules are sufficient in most cases. However, I have come across several templates where the Manager Eligibility Rules were used. The purpose, as I understand it, was to include the entire team in a manager's form, even those not processed through Employee History, and mark them as ineligible. In such cases, only a business rule was applied within the Manager Eligibility Rules.

Now, I am trying to understand why a business rule was not only created but also this field was added to the template. Without it, the Manager Eligibility Rules should still function, or so I presume.

Have a great day!

Kind regards,

Joanna

[JoannaRo · Accepted solution]

Okay, I did some further testing. I removed the column, and it had no impact on eligibility at all, so I still don't understand why it was added. Nevertheless, with the Manager Eligibility Rules, I managed to achieve the following: an employee is excluded from the EH processing but included in a worksheet. No data is displayed other than the name. It's a pity that the row is not grayed out, as it is in the Compensation worksheet.

This person falls into the second business rule:

Apologies if this seems like a basic post for the community, but I'm still exploring the Variable Pay capabilities. 😊 Hopefully, other newbies will find it helpful!

Xavier, again thank you for your help! As always - priceless!

[xavierlegarrec]

Hi @JoannaRo 

If you switch the xml tag to include-eligible-users-only to false at the bottom of the VP xml it will do exactly the same than what you achieved with the Manager Eligibility Rule:

We recommend starting with true because most customers don't want ineligible employees (the ones that are getting a record retrieved from EC or are fully excluded based on the global eligibility rule) to show on worksheets at all.

All the best

Xavier

[JoannaRo]

Hi @xavierlegarrec 

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but it did not work the same way for me 😥 I tried with this switch, but the result is that the global eligibility rule is basically ignored.

Here’s an example: my template is set to include inactive employees, but the customer obviously doesn’t want to see employees terminated before the bonus period. My global rule specifies: include only those terminated employees with a termination date on or after 1/1/2024. With the switch turned off, I still see employees terminated in 2022 and 2023 on the worksheet—employees who are not eligible for the payout but are still included in the table.

That’s not what I want. So again, the only method that worked for me was to use the Manager Eligibility Rule to exclude them. My tests indicate that if we want to include only selected ineligible employees, the switch needs to be set to ‘false’ in combination with Manager Eligibility Rules.