Updates from First Payroll

Today employees received their first pay check from the upgraded HR Direct application. In addition to the printed advice employees can also view their own information via employee self service. To login, all you need is your UML email account and password.

While most observations are very positive, there are new things we are learning. Here are a couple topics and updates:

FLSA (Fair Labor and Standards Agreement)

With the implementation of HR Direct, we are now applying federal FLSA regulations into our payroll calculations. For employees who work shifts and overtime,it is possible that you will see a slight increase in the calculation of yoursalary. If FLSA was applied to your payroll, there will be a message onyoupay advice indicating this. Unfortunately the printis a little messed upon this first pay advice, but it will be fixed for the May 29th pay advice. If you have FLSA earnings, you will note that the Rate *Hours maynot equal the Earnings.Please contactPayroll if you have questions.

Lowell had 41 employeeswhohad additional earnings with their FLSA this pay period.

Pay Checks

You may notice there are some new deductions shown on your pay advice. Please review the
Pay Advice Fact Sheet.

Some employees reported problems cashing their 5/15/2009 pay check, particularly at Bank of America branches. This problem was caused by an incorrect (old) account number on the printed checks. The UMass Treasurer alerted the bank once the problem was identified, and UMass has received assurances from Bank of America that the checks will be cashed. The problem hasbeencorrected for future payrolls. This problemdid not impact direct deposit in any way. All employees are encourged to have direct deposit — visit http://www.uml.edu/hr/forms.html to get a form for direct deposit.

Leave Accruals

Theleave accrual displayed on the05/01/2009 self-service advice, may have incorrrect leave balances — the values printedon that pay advice were correct. The values on today’s pay advice (05/15/2009) should be correct –contact usif you have questions.

Eight employees had extra Personal Leave mistakenly awarded to them this pay period and all have been notified. Adjustments will be made to correct for the May 29th advice.

Additional Pay (Compensation for additional tasks)

Some employees are enjoying extra money in this weeks pay check due to some errors in payroll processing. The Payroll Office will be making necessary adjustments and these errors will be corrected for the 05/29/09 pay advice. If you are impacted, you will receive direct communicatiton from the Payroll Office.

HR Direct 9.0 is now Live

We are very pleased to report that the HR Direct application went liveon Mondaymorning (5/4/09). The Human Resource staff was the first to enter the new system and spent Monday validating and updating data as needed.Beginning Tuesday (May 5) employees who perform timekeeping can begin using the new HR Direct 9.0 application. Employee Self-Service will be rolled out after the first payroll and will become available on Friday, May 15th.

With any new system, we do suspect there will be some issues and we are prepared to address those issueswith a multiple tier support process. This includes a full team of developers and application specialists working in the President’s Office in Shrewsbury. On campus we have our Human Resource, Information Technology (Enterprise Systems; Security; Training and Help Desk), and the A&F Administrative Systems staff all fully engaged in providing necessary support to you and the entire campus user population. As issues are identified you can be assured they will be investigated and you will receive a response from our campus team.

AsHR staff and departmental timekeepers beginworking in HR Direct please remember the following:

  • There are drop-in support labs being staffed this week and next, so please stop in if you need any personal assistance.See schedule.
  • Login using your UMass Lowell email credentials ‘ no more LFLAST login names
  • Contact the Help Desk at x4357 (HELP) if you have issues logging in or any desktop issues (popups, trusted site, etc.)
  • Contact our HR Go Live station at x1804 for functional issues (finding employees, data issues, navigation missing, etc)
  • You can see your own employee self-service functions, but the full campus population won’t access HR Direct until May 15th

Updates on HR Direct Go-Live

As we go through our cutover process, we learn a bit more about the application and functionality. Here are couple quick updates:

  • UPK will not be accessible from within HR Direct at go-live as there is a technical issue UITS and the vendor have not been able toresolve. The work around is for you to go directly to the UPK via the training web page. Once this is available from within HR Direct we will let you know.
  • HR Direct will timeout after 60 minutes of inactivity — we have mistakenly been stating it would be 20 minutes. There will be no warning on the logout.
  • See the login schedule to know when you should begin using HR Direct. NOTE: Student Employees do not get access until summer or fall.