UKG Pro General Ledger (GL): Deciphered

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UKG Pro contains General Ledger functionality that captures payroll transactions and outputs them into a file formatted for import into your company’s financial system. When implemented and configured correctly, this GL function can eliminate or reduce manual manipulation of the data — which in turn reduces human error and improves compliance. Auditors love this type of automation, and your team will too! An optimized GL will allow your team to focus on bigger tasks, by freeing up time and improving efficiency.

GL: What It Is, Why It’s Important

Companies record their financial activity in a General Ledger (GL). This General Ledger is used for financial reporting, planning and compliance. GL affects every department within your company. From an HR and Payroll standpoint, GL is used for payroll recording as well as any forecasting and planning.

Scroll down to the end of this post to review our GL Glossary.

What causes GL challenges?

During your UKG Pro launch, or implementation, your GL will be configured. This includes setting up Organization Levels, GL Rules, and the GL export file and/or reports. (see our glossary at the bottom of this post for full definitions on these and other concepts).

During this initial configuration it is important to consider:

  • Finance, Payroll and HR: GL rules define how transactions are mapped and affect all three departments. If only one department is involved in the decision-making process; it’s possible that something will get missed, forcing another department to manipulate the data they receive. All departments should be part of the conversation.
  • Translations: Finance, payroll and HR departments don’t speak the same language! Each discipline has different words for similar concepts; for example, Departments versus Cost Centers. UKG Pro allows you to translate these words in a way that all departments will have the information they need at the end of each payroll.
  • Prepare for change: Consider where your company is now and where it is going. As you grow, so must your GL rules and tables. Your team should think strategically while implementing your system. Make sure to have your tables reviewed periodically to ensure that they still work the way you need them to for your current organizational structure.

So, what now?

At the end of the GL Process, you will have access to a GL Export File. This file, configured within UKG Pro, contains the required data for your financial system. If someone on your team is spending time manipulating this data, that is a sign that something needs to be optimized within your system.

The GL rules within UKG Pro are so configurable that they should work FOR you. Although it is not an accounting software, UKG Pro has the functionality, out of the box, to simplify your processes and make sure your data is clean and transferable across all departments.

If you believe you need a GL Review or have questions about how to optimize your system’s functionality, feel free to contact us today.

GL Glossary:

Components of UKG Pro GL configuration:

  • GL Base Account: The GL Base Account codes are used as the fixed portion of your General Ledger (GL) account number.
  • GL Segment Sequence: GL account numbers consist of cost center information, base accounts, and constant values that are unique to your accounting system. These components are referred to as segments of the general ledger.  Segment Sequences are sections linked together to form the GL account number. Your company defines which components are valuable for reporting, budgeting, and analysis.
  • GL Rules: The GL Rules defines how payroll transactions are mapped and reported on the GL export file or GL reports.  Mapping components on the GL Rules table include the GL Type Code, Payroll code (earning, deduction, or tax), base account, and segment sequence.

GL Export File:
An export template is configured in UKG Pro to allow the export of payroll data required for the financial system.  The export extracts its data from the General Ledger/Labor Allocations table. The resulting GL file includes the sum of debit and credit amounts by general ledger (GL) account number.

Organization (Org) Levels
Org levels in UKG Pro are typically used to classify employees based on a specific group for the purpose of reporting and/or GL posting. Examples of classification types include:

  • Cost Centers
  • Business Units
  • Region.

GL Type Code – each type of payroll transactions is identified with a GL Type Code.  The GL Type Code will assist with troubleshooting items that may appear on the GL Suspense Detail report.

GL Type Code
GL Type Code  General Ledger Code  Description  Debit  Credit
EE Earnings expense Debit  
DE EE Deduction payable   Credit
TE EE Taxes payable   Credit
NC EE Net pay checks   Credit
ND EE Net pay direct deposit   Credit
TR ER Taxes expense Debit  
TL ER Taxes liability   Credit
DR ER Deduction expense Debit  
DL ER Deduction liability   Credit

GL Suspense Detail report – this report is generated after the GL process is run.  If all payroll items are mapped on the GL Rules table, this report will be blank.  If items exist on this report, the GL Rules table must be updated to map that code.  Once mapped, the GL Process must be re-run.

Labor Allocations and the Auto Allocate feature are not necessarily part of GL and although commonly are used; they may not be used by every company. They are included in this list because they will affect the GL file.

  • Labor Allocations allow you to automatically or manually allocate your employees’ earnings and hours worked to cost centers such as departments, divisions, or projects.
  • The Auto Allocate feature allocates all employees’ wages according to a percentage, not specific time worked. This method is typically used for auto paid employees. Labor allocations for hourly employees can also be defined using the manual allocation method (such as through a time clock import)

If you believe you need a GL Review or have questions about how to optimize your system’s functionality, feel free to contact us today.

Open Enrollment: Simplified

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UltiPro offers you a variety of tools to help make open enrollment easier for your HR and payroll team. Whether you have an employee population of 30 or 30,000, the basic tenets of open enrollment are the same: develop a good attack plan and start early! Essential steps of your strategic plan for Open Enrollment include:

  • Having the right people to have on your team (and when to involve them)
  • Advance planning and scheduling
  • Tools from Ultimate and how to use them
  • A comprehensive OE checklist to guide the team’s efforts
  • Proper configuration; data management; and reporting

Watch our webinar on this topic here: 

To download the slides used during the webinar on this topic, click here

The Right People at the Right Time

Your Open Enrollment team should include the following roles:

  • System administrator – to configure the business rules and the OE session(s)
  • Benefits administrator – who will confirm benefits start and stop dates
  • Payroll administrator – who will confirm pay period dates.

These roles do not need to be assigned to three separate people, as long as these critical functions are represented on your OE planning team. Also important are testers, to provide a dry run on your OE sessions from the end users’ point of view and identify potential confusion or errors so you can make necessary tweaks in the process.

Advance Planning is Critical

The key to a smooth OE process is to start early! If your OE process is during Q4, as many are, you should be starting the planning process in late Q2 or early Q3, to finalize as many details about the process as possible, and begin advance communication to other departments who will serve as your partners in the process. Let them know what their part is and what you will need from them, and when.

Make the Most of What Ultimate Offers You

Ultimate’s toolkit provides guided tours, checklists and reports that walk you through all critical and post-open enrollment activities, and are vital for a successful open enrollment. Your project team should review the toolkit together. The toolkit covers planning; analysis and configuration; configuration and testing; final preparation; go-live; monitoring; and post-open enrollment.

Reports, Configuration and Data Management

Ultimate offers several standard reports in the web and through business intelligence (BI) that can help your HR team before, during and after Open Enrollment. Standard reports include:

  • Enrollment status
  • Dependents beyond qualifying age
  • Employees with benefit group changes
  • COBRA dropped dependents
  • Summary of elections
  • Employees with pending evidence of insurability

Be sure to review all your open enrollment custom reports from the prior year to make sure all data is complete, both for your internal team and your OE vendor(s). It’s very important to run reports before OE to be proactive with customer reports and vendor file feeds. Running reports for data validation (missing or invalid employee benefit data) can catch date discrepancies that can cause errors in the OE session for employees.

Before configuring your OE session, be sure to review and update all business rules that affect OE: deduction/benefit groups and types; dedication/benefit plans; benefit options, and relationships (spouse or child(ren)).

A critical piece of OE is the pending effective date. Use the Pending Effective Date Estimator to determine rates and when employees will be able to view their elections. Once the pending effective date is configured in your OE session, you may not make changes without deleting the contents of the session – which means you’ll need to reconfigure the entire session.

Decide if you will administer active open enrollment, which requires employees to elect/re-elect (or turn down) coverage, or passive open enrollment, which automatically re-enrolls employees, unless they make changes in their coverage. Mosaic recommends an active OE which requires employees to re-elect benefits, but passive OE is right for some companies, based on the size and type of employee population (with the exception of FSAs, which require employees to re-enroll every year).

New Features

Ultimate now provides the option to copy OE sessions from one year to the next, to save manual rekeying of information and the need to reconfigure information if your OE session has not changed significantly from year to year, and reduce potential data errors during configuration. Other new features include deduction/benefit groups page enhancements, which allows administrators to apply mass updates and change start and stop dates for OE sessions, and the option to delete OE sessions in an incomplete status – such as incorrectly configured or unnecessary sessions.

Want to learn more about how to plan and execute a stress-free, successful OE session?

Contact us today

System Optimization: Telltale Signs Your UKG Pro System Isn’t Optimized

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UKG Pro puts the power of your organization’s people data at your fingertips. The UKG Pro HCM platform offers you robust capabilities for digging deep into your data to learn more about your business, including trends, gaps, weak points, and opportunities to grow or simply streamline your operations.

UKG Pro can transfer data seamlessly among different platforms, increasing fluency and accuracy in your HRIS data, automate manual processes, and create business intelligence reports that help you make better business decisions. And that’s just the beginning.

There’s so much that UKG Pro can do that you may not be aware of system capabilities you aren’t utilizing. UKG Pro is a significant investment—the more you know about your system and the areas it can help, the better your ROI.

If you have an organizational need – a process that seems cumbersome, data that has to be manually updated, an upcoming audit or seasonal company event that has a great deal of complexity – look first within your UKG Pro system to see what it can do.

You may have just completed a major implementation, or your company may be facing rapid growth, a merger or acquisition; or you may have just lost a key member of your HRIS team who had significant institutional knowledge and you are trying to fill the gap.

The good news is, by asking the right questions, you can almost always find a way that UKG Pro can do more for you.

Watch the recording of our webinar on this topic:

Click here to download the slides used during this webinar.

The First Step: Asking the Right Questions

Whether you are new to UKG Pro or a veteran user, it is important to regularly review your current system and its configuration to make sure it is still the correct set-up for your company. Below is a series of conversation-driven questions you can have with your C-suite leaders, your HRIS team, or end users of the system, to understand your business processes, both current and desired. You can use these questions to guide you in your own optimization projects:

  • Do you find yourself entering the same data multiple times in UKG Pro?
  • Do you regularly run reports in Cognos, then fix the data in Excel, to get the data you need?
    Read our blog on Cognos Analytics to find out more about what Cognos can do for you and your team.
  • Does your data entry require many manual steps before it’s ready for UKG Pro?
  • Are you still processing benefit elections on paper?
  • Do your employees and managers have too much access (or too little access) to the system?
    The right system access may seem like a simple thing, but here’s an example of what can go wrong: a Mosaic client was helping managers get additional access to data on their employees. Working late on a weekend, the client inadvertently assigned Super Admin Access to all company employees. When employees started to find out they had access to C-level salary information, it was too late, and information began to spread like wildfire. While this is an extreme case, are you certain that access given to employees is appropriate? Too much access is just as bad as not enough, in some cases.
  • Does UKG Pro configuration match your business needs and requirements?
    Remember, have UKG Pro work for you – not the other way around! All businesses have their own processes and ways of managing their companies. UKG Pro can be configured to meet those needs in more ways than you may realize. Don’t work for UKG Pro by doing processes manually – make UKG Pro work for you!
  • Do decision makers have the necessary information available to make appropriate business decisions?
  • What types of dashboards and reports do your executives use? How stale is the data being used?
  • Is your executive team making potential life changing decisions on outdated data?
  • Does UKG Pro interface with vendors to provide real-time and accurate data on employees?
    If UKG Pro interfaces with your vendors, that’s great news, but when was the last time the interface was reviewed? Is it working correctly, does it provide the data needed? Or does your team still find themselves manually manipulating data before it is sent off? UKG Pro can save time and effort, reduce the likelihood of human error, and free your team from manual tasks to focus on the highest and best use of their time. For more on UltiPro Interfaces read our blog on UKG Pro Integrations.
  • Does your team have the right tools and knowledge of UKG Pro to support your organization?
  • Are you prepared for an audit? What about a different interruption?
    Some audits may be planned, and others may be a surprise. If the department of labor came to your office, how prepared would your team be and what would they find?

All of these questions will help you assess whether you are getting everything you need out of your UKG Pro system. And the answer isn’t a one-size-fits all: UKG Pro can do different things for different organizations, depending on your need. The key is making sure that you’re using it to full capacity, whatever your strategic business needs.

What is a System Optimization Review?

A good first step to optimize your system is a complete system and process review. Assessing your UKG Pro system is a process that you can undertake on your own, or you can bring in a specialist to help you.

A System and Process Review gives you a comprehensive understanding of the areas that may be underutilized where you can focus to begin optimizing your UKG Pro system

A system review is performed by a seasoned consultant who spends two to three days onsite, on the ground, with your team – C-suite leaders, your HRIS team, IT, and any others who use your UKG Pro system. During this time with your team, the consultant probes to learn about all company processes and configuration, and whether UKG Pro is properly configured to support those processes.

The benefit: you’ll gain a comprehensive view of your current functionality as well as future, best-case functionality, and a road map to get there. Mosaic recommends System and Process Reviews to all clients who wish to ensure their UKG Pro is fully optimized. Click here to read more about how one of our clients benefited from their System Review. Interested in moving forward? Contact us today!

Note: UKG Pro was formerly UltiPro.

UKG Pro Integrations: Files, Data and API’s, Oh My!

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Employee-related expenses (salaries, benefits, taxes, etc.) comprise up to 70% of a company’s total operating expenses – which makes leveraging HR technology to make informed business decisions imperative. HR, Finance, and Operations leaders’ ability to use data effectively to move the business forward depends on having a reliable central source for company data, and the ability to seamlessly update and ensure data integrity, in concert, across many different technology platforms.

For many companies, UKG Pro serves as the “system of record” for most employee and organizational data, making it the best and most reliable source to feed systems, vendors, and processes. Integrations help maintain data integrity in internal and external sources, using UKG Pro as the source of truth, for improved accuracy, security, efficiency, compliance, and decision-making.

Watch the recording of our webinar on this topic:

Click here to download the slides used during this webinar.

Why Use Integrations?

Integrations help systems to interact, working with consistent, accurate data among the multiple systems to make informed decisions. Integrations have many benefits, such as enhancing the user experience, improving processes by consolidating data to make it more consumable/actionable, and limiting manual work for your payroll, HR, IT and accounting staff. UKG Pro integrations help free your team of mundane and repeatable tasks to focus on more global and meaningful aspects of your business: your people, your strategy, and the bottom line.

Integrations help data flow from UKG Pro to other systems and to vendors who use employee data to support your company, such as:

  • New hire set-up from your recruiting and applicant tracking system to UKG Pro
  • Hardware procurement and set-up and IT access for new hires
  • Keeping time clock and scheduling system up to date
  • Sending 401(k) demographics and contribution information to a vendor
  • Revoking facility access of an employee upon termination

Which Integration(s) Are Right For Me?

There are many types of integrations to import data into UKG Pro from an external source or to push data out of UKG Pro. Determining the type of integration to deploy will depend on many factors, including:

  • Data fields to be sent/received to/from other system(s)
  • Frequency of the data exchange
  • Resources available (IT resources, staff availability, staff experience)
  • Priority, sensitivity, and security of data being exchanged
  • Restrictions/Capabilities of the UKG Pro integration methods
  • Capabilities and data transfer methods available with external system(s)

In addition to these factors, we recommend a quick review of your business processes to help identify opportunities for an integration.

Integrations can also address security or compliance vulnerabilities. Automatically generating and sending general ledger files to the GL system eliminates the opportunity for manual manipulation the GL files. (manual manipulation of GL files has been used to cover up fraudulent payroll activities.)

An Overview of Various UKG Pro Integrations

UKG provides many methods and tools for integrating UKG Pro with other systems and platforms. Most common integrations fall in the following categories:

  • Web Services/Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) – UKG Pro’s Web Services and APIs are commonly used for integrating with recruiting/applicant tracking systems, Active Directory, and global third party pay, or directly to systems with built-in API functionality. An API runs on an application server – which can be hosted and maintained by your internal IT department, or you may choose cloud-hosted API platforms (such as Cloud Connectors, Mulesoft, or Informatica). You can find documentation on UKG Pro APIs at connect.ultipro.com/documentation#/api.
  • SQL Framework Interfaces – These are custom exports or imports that are built upon UKG’s defined development framework. While these types of interfaces are customized to your (or your vendor’s) specific requirements, they are programmed in a standard method which ensures compatibility with future UKG Pro upgrades. SQL interfaces typically generate text files to send to the system or vendor, and they can be automated to run periodically or run based on triggers (such as payroll close). Common SQL interfaces are 401K Contributions, medical files, HSA/FSA contributions, General Ledger files, and NACHA files.
  • Ultimate Carrier Network (UCN) Interfaces – A UCN interface is an export built and maintained by UKG for a select few large benefits vendors. If the benefit vendor is available as UCN, these interfaces are very cost-effective.
  • Web Import Tool – The web import tool provides a platform for importing data into UKG Pro from third-party systems or files that you develop and controlling the flow of data into UKG Pro Core Web, either manually or automatically.
  • Backoffice Imports/Exports – Backoffice imports and exports are built as templates that allow mapping and logic to create a repeatable process for importing or exporting data into or out of UKG Pro. Common use cases include:  time clock imports, GL exports, and bank NACHA files.

Ultimately, integrations help UKG Pro stay in sync with other applications, vendors, processes and services to improve efficiency, reduce vulnerabilities for fraud and abuse, and help company leaders make more strategic, informed decisions.

Note: UKG was formerly Ultimate Software. UKG Pro was formerly UltiPro.

Think Like a Marketer to Recruit Top Talent

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It’s been said that the hardest sales job is recruiting – because your product can change its mind. It’s true and it’s a good reminder that recruiting is selling. If you want to recruit the top performers, here are four important things to get right:

  1. Marketing.

The key to great marketing is to know your audience and speak to what matters to them. Audience is just as important in recruiting. Job descriptions that first answer “why work here?” are much more appealing than those that start with a long list of job requirements. You need to capture your audience, in the same way that the best marketing messages focus on how you or your product can help your prospect. The best job descriptions start by answering whats in it for me?

  1. The Sales Pitch.

When you describe your company to a candidate, is your message consistent with the company’s marketing materials? What is your market differentiator? Are you delivering the same message to candidates that the sales team is delivering to prospective customers? A solid understanding of the company’s business model and where it is going is essential for communicating how your opportunity will boost careers. Make sure recruiting is aligned with the sales team in terms of conveying a consistent message about the company.

  1. Get on the phone!

70% of the workforce is comprised of people who aren’t looking for jobs, yet 87% of both active and passive job seekers are open to new opportunities. Like customers, the majority of candidates do not magically appear. This means that you need to find them and proactively engage with them. Despite the heavy usage of technology and social media today: the most effective way to recruit passive candidates is to pick up the phone.

  1. Get the right technology.

The correct technology is crucial in finding and engaging top talent, and once you find the right one for you, it will simplify your process and improve both your team and candidates’ experiences. The right technology allows you to engage and navigate your candidate pool, it also removes barriers for applicants, making it easy for the right candidates to apply to the right jobs, while allowing your team the tools they need to manage their relationships with applicants. In fact, 77% of people think less of companies that don’t respond to job applicants, your recruiting processes are a big part of your brand! How do you track and manage your candidate pipeline? Timely responses to candidates and frequent updates to applicant status is critical in building a positive employer brand.

With all of this in mind we recommend UKG Pro Recruiting. As part of the UKG Pro Talent Acquisition Module, UKG Pro Recruiting offers a full breadth of services that will allow you to manage your candidate experience by personalizing your engagement with them. Candidates will be able to leverage familiar tools and use their mobile devices to search and apply for your open positions. Your team will be able to proactively engage with candidates and plan for future talent needs as well as assess not only skills and experience but also behaviors, motivations and career aspirations to ensure only the best people, with the best fit, join your team.

As a UKG-only consulting group, Mosaic can help you implement or optimize your UKG Pro Talent Acquisition Module as well as the whole UKG Pro suite. Our team of experts can make sure you are getting the most out of your system.

Note: UKG was formerly Ultimate Software. UKG Pro was formerly UltiPro.

Cognos Analytics: A Brave New World

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The UKG Pro BI upgrade to Cognos Analytics is the most significant update to the platform in over a decade. The new environment looks and feels different to users, but once acclimated, you’ll find the system is more intuitive to use and provides some fantastic new capabilities that will allow you to manage data and create reports more effectively than before. Continue reading for a view of what is the same, what is gone and what is new with Cognos Analytics. At the bottom of this article you will find a recording of the Mosaic Webinar on this topic.

What is Cognos? 

If you’re not an experienced user of Cognos, Cognos Analytics is the next generation of Business Intelligence for UKG Pro. The Cognos platform provides a new, interactive way to find, explore and share UKG Pro data-driven insights. It integrates reporting, analysis, dashboards, and event management to help users access and mobilize company data to make business decisions.

What’s the Same 

The upgrade, which was rolled out this spring, maintains much of the same functionality that Cognos users have come to know: the same UKG Pro folder system they used to navigate,  delivered reports, delivered packages, learning resources and your company BI content, all remain. System administration, report-building capabilities, report delivery, execution options, and notifications all remain the same as before. Role level security within BI remains the same as in UKG Pro.

What’s Gone

Query, Report & Analysis Studios have been rolled up into a single report development environment, Public Folders from Cognos 10. Query Studio Reports convert easily to Reports. Portal Pages and Portlets pages open in a new window with the same look and functionality, including tabs.

What’s New

Cognos Analytics now features a brand new interface that is more nimble, with more features that make it more browser-friendly, delivers better content, and more interactive capabilities.

Highlights include a new welcome portal and new content search functionality. The home page replaces Cognos Connection. The welcome page lists recently accessed  reporting content. Navigation is controlled by a new panel on the left and a new status bar across the top that tells users what is open.

Other changes:

  • New folder nomenclature: “My Folders” is now called “My Content,” and the “Public Folder” tab is called “Team Content.”
  • Fly-out panels and icons have replaced icons and drop-down menus, for less visual clutter and more intuitive searching.
  • A single report development tool, where users can view and manipulate live data in preview mode.
  • More visualization tools, including bubble charts, Word Clouds and animations, which have replaced 3D charts.
  • A dashboard development environment that provides cognitive visibility of data.
  • Searchable by topic.
  • The capability to aggregate, sort, convert reports to charts and re-render with data, or “pin” data points as favorites.

Unless the user has a particular set of rules enforced, they will see the same information as in Cognos: Company Folders, Sample Folders, and BI Content.

A new Analytics User role replaces the Consumer along with increased capabilities, with no change to data access and filtering. Users still have access to delivered content including numerous reports, portal pages, and alerts. Users can modify these reports by simply copying into their folder and making their own versions and introduce different data filters.

Finally, the Cognos upgrade allows you to look at your company information in new ways and interact with it. Your Mosaic team can help you understand the new capabilities of Cognos Analytics to support your data analysis and reporting needs.

Watch the Mosaic Webinar on: Cognos Analytics: A Brave New World