October 2022 bulletin
Important - for action/attention this month
HESA return – first deadline met
Processing leavers and rehires to prevent failures for HMRC submissions
Clear all errors from the data quality reports
News and reminders
New functionality has recently become available in Recruitment, within an applicant record, which allows a user to ignore or delete a single document from the applicant pack. This was released into the Portal automatically by our supplier, and until recently was only available to the HR Systems Support team in the Back Office.
We kindly request that you do not use this functionality until we release guidance on the correct usage of this. If used incorrectly, an applicant’s document attached to their application may be missed by the shortlisting board, affecting their decision negatively. We will be in touch with an update on this as soon as we are able to do so.
The Thank You Payment Exceptions Panel has continued to receive some ad-hoc Thank You Payment exception requests throughout September and October. As the Thank You Payment was a one-off discretionary payment, paid from a central budget, the Thank You Payment Exceptions Panel cannot continue to accept/review any further requests, beyond the October payroll deadline.
Any anomalies coming to light going forward will need to be dealt with by the department, at its own discretion. The Thank You Payment FAQs webpage will remain live until the end of the year and can be referred to for guidance, alongside the additional guidance shared with HR staff earlier this year.
Payroll corner
The University experienced a failed RTI submission to HMRC due to several records being processed incorrectly in PeopleXD. Where this results in a late submission, the University will be fined by HMRC and employees’ tax payments may be impacted due to the late processing of the latest pay data.
To avoid issues, you must always process leavers, regardless of the actual leaving date, in one payroll period, and rehire them in the following payroll period. This is especially important where there was a gap in service between the two appointments, eg you must not appoint someone as an additional future-dated appointment and then end the original appointment back-dated, all in the same payroll period. This creates confusion in the system and incorrect feeding of data for HMRC submission of RTI, resulting in an error, ie being a leaver and a new starter in the same payroll period.
Always follow our guidance or contact HR System Support or Payroll, if in doubt. We are working on improving our guidance on these topics. See also: https://hrsystems.admin.ox.ac.uk/files/scenariofactsheet-understandingpayrollcyclespdf
Update from the HR Analytics team
The HR Analytics team is delighted to report that we have met the first deadline for submission of the University’s HESA Staff return. This was no mean feat as none of us had ever been responsible for completing the return before. Sarah Rowles, Team Leader in the team, worked day and night (almost literally at times!) to pull together the thousands of data items, while the rest of the team supported with data derivations and the data quality issues.
This enormous annual exercise is made more challenging by data quality issues in PeopleXD. We are in the process of working through 31,000 data ‘issues’ that HESA have identified in our return. Many of these relate to missing diversity data and data items such as Previous Employment.
We need an overhaul of the HESA return process and a different approach to data quality, both to improve the outcome and to reduce the burden on our team and departments, at this busy time of year. After the final submission in November, we will start to consider how to improve the entire process, and the support for PeopleXD users to get the data right, in future. If you have any suggestions, or would like to be involved in this work, email us at hris.dataquality@admin.ox.ac.uk.
The HR Analytics team will soon be releasing the 2022-23 version of all the HRINFO data quality reports; 01 – employees, 20 – casuals, 21 - recruitment. Please run this suite of reports at least monthly and clear any errors in a timely manner. For guidance on making the indicated changes to clear the data anomalies highlighted in the report, please refer to data quality.
|
Report name |
Action required |
Required for |
|---|---|---|
| HRINFO01- Staff Validation in conjunction with HRINFO01 Data Validation – Quals & subjects |
Clear validation errors for all employee appointments active for any period of time from 1 August until 31 July the following year. HRINFO01 data quality validation report web page gives additional details about the report. Prioritise the clearing of staff classification errors first. Guidance can be found here: |
HESA Medical Schools Council Survey Athena SWAN Financial year end reporting |
| HRINFO20_Casual Worker Data Quality Validation |
Clear validation errors for all casual worker and casual teaching appointments active for any period of time from 1 August until 31 July the following year. |
HESA |
|
HRINFO21 Vacancy and applicant data quality 4 pageanated reports: Step 1 Advertised Vacancy Validation Step 2 Applicant Status Validation Step 3 Non-Advertised Vacancy Validation
|
Clear validation errors for all vacancies posted externally on or after 1 August. |
HESA Athena SWAN Race Equality Charter |
For support with running the reports, please email hr.systems@admin.ox.ac.uk or call 01865 (2)87900.
For queries related to the data in the reports, contact the HR Analytics team on hris.dataquality@admin.ox.ac.uk; (give the Person Reference number and appointment ID for those with more than one contract). For queries relating to appointment records: provide the Vacancy ID, for queries relating to clearing errors from the HRINFO21 Step 1, Step 2 & Step 3 reports, and Applicant ID for queries relating to adding a missing applicant status.
Reward updates
If a department is enquiring about whether a post has been authorised, please give the staff request number and not the vacancy number (the Reward team cannot trace them on PeopleXD).
When a department is requesting additional posts to be created because they have had a successful recruitment, please note that if the original Staff Request asked for only one post, they will need to raise a new one for any additional posts.
This month's deadlines
Monthly payroll dates are now available from the This month's Payroll deadlines webpage.
Please bookmark this page, which is updated monthly.
