Tracking contracted employees - Best Practices

Most clients that I work with use separate employee status code, so that contract employees are co-mingled with regular employees for position management/budgeting, supervisor hierarchy, reporting, etc.

We've been trying to decide the same thing.  We do currently track some "Non Paid Asscociates" in our main Lawson company under a separate status code which is no pay/no benefits. So far we only input those that supervise paid employees.  Even with that close tie, we often don't hear about when they are no longer working at our hospital. 

We have a lot more that have been requested to be added but we are considering the upkeep of those to be outside of HR which means for true separation of data, we would like to put them in their own Lawson company. We could then setup separate position rules, completely separate out security, have different numbering schemes etc.  For example, we require personnel actions for our main company but for these non paid associates we could let them enter directly on HR11.

By the way, we currently have about 8000 employees in our system and will be shortly taking on 1200+ more.

I am very curious about how others feel about this or what is currently in practice. 

We are currently assesing the best practice as well.
Our situation includes bringing time records (from Kronos) to maintain hours for history reporting.

We have looked at new company versus independent process level.

Still looking for other ideas and experiences would like to hear from others.

We just use a seperate Emp-Status code if the contractor is in leadership, so they can view direct reports, org chart, etc, just as normal management. For everything payroll related, we have to exclude this code.

We have a seperate company for all other non-employees (Physicians, Volunteers, etc). This has very few required fields, so it's easy to maintain. And they're kept completely seperate from all our regular processing and reports.

This is very timely, we are in the process of setting this up right now.

Like others who have commented, we do have contract managers in with the regular employees with a no pay/no benefits status code so they can be part of the supervisory heirarchy and use Manager Self Service.

Downsides of setting up a separate company for the other non-employee staff include: the work involved for the initial set up; the ongoing maintenance since some new codes such as job codes may need to be set up in both companies; the supervisor structure can not cross companies so managers responsible for these staff members can not see them or manage them in manager self service; and staff can not transfer from one company to another so if a contractor gets hired they need to be terminated from the contractor company and hired with a new employee number in the main company.

However, even with these downsides we decided to set up a separate company because there are a number of fields that we want to continue to require for employees, but do not want to require for non-employees. The big one is of course social security number, but also birthdate, home address, etc.
As others have mentioned, we will have very few required fields and will not require personnel actions for this company. We will use the same department, job, position, supervisor codes, etc so these staff members can be co-mingled with regular staff on our reports (we use Crystal Reports, not standard Lawson Reports for most everything)

We are setting ours up in a seperate process level in a no pay status to minimize the risk of ever having a paycheck created.

If we ever want to bring hours over from KRONOS for historical reporting, I am thinking I will bring them into LP only. The interface from KRONOS will differ from the one that populated the PRTRCSV file for the PR530.   I also don't want to have those hours viewed the same as time records.

I appreciate all the comments! Definite pros and cons to the various setup options. Please keep the comments coming!

I appreciate all the comments! Definite pros and cons to the various setup options. Please keep the comments coming!

Setting up it as a different company will have the following challenges;
1. Security 2. Supervisor Structure 3. Reporting challenges between companies 4. Interface challenges if we have to send Payroll/Paid and Contractor info to external vendors 5. From a Workforce analytics, there will be challenges 6. It is lot of work not just from the HR side, but also from the Finance side to setup all the account structure, GL etc.

Recommendation would be to set it up as a totally different Process Level or multiple process levels depending on how you separate these Contractors/Non-Payroll/Student/Volunteers etc. You can also create separate Status Codes to identify these group of non-employees. This way they are in the same Company, will be available from a security, org level, supervisory structure and for reporting as well. All the data like Job code, dept, personnel action, supervisor etc.

But on the other hand, you have to make sure that we should be able to separate and identify the non-employees from the employees as long as you can use key fields like Process level and/or Status Code.

Word of caution - Do not mix the non-employee with the employees in the same Process Level. It might be the quick and easy way, but it causes lot of issues on the long run and you have challenges with the data not just in Lawson but also with any downstream system.

Just my 2 cents of thoughts.

We set up our non-paid staff in a separate status code (CC for staff, CN for management, VN for volunteers). We have added them into the PL, Department and job code of the work that they are performing. This assigns them to a supervisor that is responsible for maintaining their record - when they term, performance evals due, other requirements.
Our non-paid staff is not transferred to Kronos - we do not track their specific time/hours worked.
We decided to set them up like this specifically for credential/licensure tracking, immunization/employee health testing, and now we are utilizing the Lawson assigned EIN required for access to our facilities IT network.

We had previously had a seperate company set up for the non paid staff but it was too much to keep up with and there was no real mechanism/process defined for terminations in the other company. All the processes/tests/credentials were set up in the main employee company so that just made the most sense for us.

We set up our contractors in a separate company. We do not need to track as much information for the contractors as we do for our paid employees, so we don't need the same number of required fields on HR11 for the contractors; the primary reason that we track them in Lawson is to allow them access to our systems, buildings, etc. We have one generic process level in the contractor company (CONTR - Contractors), and we use the codes that are the process levels in our paid company for the department codes (much smaller table and less maintenance). Most of our contractors are in our Information services proess level, so we only set up supervisor codes for the managers who hire contractors and do not duplicate the entire supervisor table. We only have 2 statuses in the contractor company-one for active and one for terminated. The contractor information is added/changed directly on HR11 by someone in our employment office; there are no personnel actions set up in this company. Our one challenge has been with terminating the contractors; we always know when they are starting, but don't always get notified that they are leaving. We recently updated procedures and did a throrough audit of the active contractors to determine who should be terminated, so we expect to keep the termination data cleaner in the future. Feel free to contact me off-line if you need more information.

Ellen Rust
HR Systems Specialist
erust@llbean.com
(207) 552-4582

It's been well covered, but here is our experience. We have our contractors in our primary company, but segregated by status code. My preference would be to have them in another company, but because of our organization (large health system), we have quite a few contractors who are actually in management & supervisory positions (the contractors have actual employees reporting to them and they report to an employee). This situation requires they be in the same company for the assignment of supervisory structure and access to Manager Self-Service.

The difficulty has been in differing data needs on the HR11. Obviously we have more data requirements for employees and there is much data we collect that we simply do not have for contract employees. This has required HRIS intervention to get them set up, including the creation of "dummy" jobcode, position, etc. It is working for us at the moment and the contractors (and their company leaders) are very happy with the ability for the contractors to now manage their employees themselves.

Question... For those one who entering non-employees are you using a bogus SSN number, all 9's, or the person actual SSN?

Thanks

Brittany,
First, you may not get the responses you'd hoped for, as this thread is pretty old, so don't be afraid to open a new thread.

Secondly, I have seen both practices. It tends to be a function related to the need to store and track SSN for secondary uses surrounding audit/compliance, tracking access to internal system resources such as VPN, or legal obligations. If no secondary need/usage exists for the SSN, but the organization DOES track non-employees, then a dummy value is used (such as all a 9's or 1's)

Kwane

If we know it, we enter the correct number. If not, we enter 9s.