ISSUE 28 • SEPTEMBER 2013

Ask OWLS Masthead

Cyclic Year Appointments

While most employees are employed a full 12-months per year, some work cyclic year appointments, meaning they are scheduled to work less than 12 full months each year due to known, recurring periods of leave in the annual cycle. Examples of cyclic year appointments include some Housing & Food Services employees and non-faculty educators in the Experimental Education Unit (EEU) who are not scheduled to work during the summer months.

When setting up or editing an OWLS record for employees with cyclic year appointments, be sure to enter the service period (the number of months the employee works per year) in the employee's record by taking the steps outlined in the Service Period section of the OWLS Online User Guide. If you are uncertain about the employee's service period, contact your unit's payroll coordinator.

Entering regular time worked for an employee with a cyclic year appointment is done just as any other calendar entry. For the scheduled period(s) during the year when the employee does not work, enter "CYL" (cyclic year leave) on all the work days during the period(s), including holidays. When you are ready to submit the month, OWLS presents you with several questions. Your answers to these questions will determine whether or not the employee accrues leave for the month. Information to help you make the entries and answer leave accrual questions is available in the OWLS User Guide.

If you have questions about leave accrual for cyclic yearly employees, please contact askowls@uw.edu. Learn more about making calendar entries for Cyclic Yearly Leave.

Supervisor Notifications

Every employee's OWLS record must have at least one designated supervisor who will review and verify the accuracy of the information that is posted. The supervisor will also receive the Post Entry Review Message (PERM) each time a record has been released and submitted for review.

An employee's OWLS record may have more than one designated supervisor who can review the records but not all supervisors need to receive the PERMs.

When a designated supervisor leaves a department or the University, or no longer needs to access an employee's record, that supervisor must be manually removed from the affected OWLS record(s). Supervisor removal does not happen automatically, and if the former supervisor received OWLS-generated PERMS, the PERMS will continue to be sent to that supervisor until the supervisor is manually removed from the employee's OWLS record.

More information about adding or deleting a supervisor can be found in the OWLS Timekeeper Guide.

If a supervisor is listed on multiple employee OWLS records and is leaving the University or moving to a position where he/she is not supervising anyone, the OWLS Support Team can assist you by changing all of the affected employee records at one time. To request this assistance, please send an email message to askowls@uw.edu, providing the name and Employee ID of the designated supervisor who needs to be removed, as well as the name of the designated supervisor who will be the replacement.

Job Class Code and Leave Plan Discrepancies

We are all excited about the eventual implementation of the HR/Payroll Modernization project, but until that happens we still have the issue of OWLS and OPUS not "talking" to each other. OWLS relies on you, the timekeeper, to keep the employee's leave records in sync. When an OWLS record is initially created, it is automatically populated with data about the employee's appointment pulled from the HEPPS payroll system, including the position's title and job class code. However, once the record is created, subsequent changes made in OPUS are not automatically reflected in OWLS. If a position's job title and job class code change after the OWLS record is established, the timekeeper must manually make the corresponding changes in OWLS. Because the job class codes in OWLS are tied to a specific leave plan, if the timekeeper does not update the OWLS record when there is a change in a position's job class code, the information governing the employee's leave accruals and other leave plan rules may be incorrect and result in significant errors in the employee's leave record.

If you find a job class code discrepancy between OWLS and OPUS, please refer to the online OWLS User Guide for steps to correct the discrepancy.

We encourage timekeepers and payroll coordinators to communicate frequently in order to keep OWLS and OPUS in sync.

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