Email Reminders and Notification

The Email Reminders and Notification page allows payroll and benefits administrators to automate notifications to employees who have not submitted their timesheets or benefits enrollments by a specified deadline. Each Reminder has a Reminder Set Number. The Set Number allows the user to designate sets of Reminders that can be processed together, removing the inconvenience of having to run all Reminder processing at one time. Reminder Set Numbers is a three-digit number that the Email Agent (batch process) checks when attempting to determine which Reminders to process.

This page also allows the user to set and generate the email reminders for timesheet conditions.

Additionally, this page allows user to capture additional information for the email triggers generated by the system and provide the user the ability to manually create new triggers on the table, such as additional Notifications selections including Default Timesheet, Work Schedule, and Other Notifications.

To process reminders, the Email Agent job, when run for Reminders, reads the Email Reminders table, and determines which Reminders are active and relevant. Active Reminders are those of which From and To Dates surround the system date. Relevant Reminders are those of which Reminder Set Numbers have been specified in the job parameters (or if the parameter is blank, all Reminders). The use of Sets allows administrators to selectively remind small sets of employees rather than to run all possible Reminders every time the job is executed.

For each Reminder that the job determines should be processed, the Email Agent assembles a list of employees for whom the transactions are to be checked. Employee lists are specified through the designation of organizational or policy characteristics. For example, a timesheet Reminder might be set up to notify all employees in Department 002 and Pay Policy NRMEX who have not submitted timesheets for the current Pay Period that they are missing the transaction.

Note: As the purpose of Email Reminders is to notify an employee of a required action, the Email Agent, when run in Reminder mode, is checking only for the existence of the required transaction (with the correct date criteria) in Submitted status. The phase of the transaction (whether it be Pending or Final) is not checked, as once the transaction is in Submitted status, it either reaches Final status or goes through workflow processing, at which point the employee’s responsibility with the transaction has ended, pending any rejections.

For timesheet Reminders, the system checks for the current Pay Period by using the employee’s Payroll Number and then matching that with the associated Pay Period (PERD) entry. The Email Agent scans the TIMEI_DOC_HDR table to locate any transactions for the relevant employees with the correct dates. For benefits Reminders, since they are run on a less frequent cycle, the specific date for the start date of the BNRL transaction created during Open Enrollment is specified on the Reminder. The Email Agent checks the BNRL_DOC_HDR table to scan for transactions for relevant employees with the proper From Date. In both cases, those employees who are missing transactions receive an email from the Email Agent, using a Template specified on the Reminder.