Charging employer benefits over the summer

The following information went directly to Area Finance Officers and Cost Center Managers on June 21, 2021.

Hello Area Finance Officers and Cost Center Managers,

We’re writing to help you make sure that employer benefits for your employees who have a position term of less than 12 months are charged to the correct place over the summer.

Employees who have a benefits eligible position with a position term of less than 12 months will have employer Benefits Package Contributions – DENTAL charged to their Default Organizational Assignment in the pay periods in which there are no earnings. If those employees have a summer position (hourly, PAP, or other), the benefits will follow the costing allocation on the earnings paid during that period. The reason for this is the Costing Allocation is only assigned to earnings, and the benefits follow the earnings. If no earnings are present, benefits will always be charged to the Default Organizational Assignment.

If you have employees that are benefit eligible with a position term of less than 12 months and do not want the Benefits Package Contributions – DENTAL charged to their Default Organizational Assignment, you have two options:

1. Complete a Payroll Accounting Adjustment for each affected employee once payroll has completed and accounting posted. Note: Payroll completes today for the most recent pay period.
2. We have developed a template departments can complete to load payroll inputs for override worktags for Benefits Package Contributions – DENTAL for the periods those employees do not work. Completing this template once will cover the entire summer for these employees (pay periods from the second half of June through the first half of August). This is called an EIB template. If you use this template, you won’t need to complete a Payroll Accounting Adjustment for each employee. A copy of the template, detailed instructions for how to fill it out and submit it, and a filled out example are available here.

Please note that neither of these options will change the payroll accounting that has already posted; only payroll accounting going forward.

The deadline to submit a completed EIB is July 2 at 1 p.m. in order for it to be effective for the second half of June payroll.

Here is a Workday report you can run to view costing allocation data for employees based on prompted values: CR PAY All Current and Future Worker Costing Allocations with Current Organizational Defaults. Using this report, you can identify your academic employees who work less than 12 months based on the Annual Work Period (Academic Pay) column. You’ll need to separately identify your non-academic employees who work less than 12 months.

Please submit any questions to the Workday Service Desk using the Payroll button at support.workday.wsu.edu.