Map Attendance Booth to Cost Center - A summary of the activity

Connecting information from ARS to Ramco HRMS: This activity is carried out to track the costs of each employee according to the cost center to which he or she is attached. It applies to only organizations that automate attendance recording through an ARS.

In an ARS (Attendance Recording System), there are booths or outlets where employees swipe in and swipe out, to record the time they spent within the organization. The ARS must record the booth number that identifies each attendance booth, as well as the employee’s swipe-in and swipe-out timings and his/her employee code.

Ideally, an attendance booth is installed for every function such as HR, Development and Administration. The employees under a function will swipe in and out at this attendance booth. Through the “Map Attendance Booth-Cost Center” activity, you can map each attendance booth to a specific cost center, to enable the tracking of employee attendance for each cost center.

Identifying the correct cost center with which to map the attendance booth: The attendance booth must be mapped to the same cost center as the function for which the attendance booth is installed.

The function is the core element that determines both

•  The cost center of each employee as well as

•  The cost center to be mapped to the attendance booth.

At the outset, when each function is defined, the function is mapped to a specific cost center. Later, when an employee is assigned to a function through the Employee Assignment activity, the employee inherits the function’s cost center.

The attendance booth is intended to help track the costs of each employee, according to cost center. Therefore, it must be mapped to the specific cost center that is applicable for the employees swiping at the booth.

Ensuring that this activity is meaningful for employee cost-tracking: This activity is meaningful only when

•  Each attendance booth is specific for a function / group. Example Booth-A, which is in the Ground Floor, is specific for the Administration Group.

•  All the employees under the group swipe at the booth specific to the group / function. For example, all the 20 employees of the Administration Group swipe in and out at Booth-A, which is in the Ground Floor. Booth-A is mapped to Cost Center Cc-Admin.  Besides, these employees are administrative staff and logically belong to Cost Center Cc-Admin. In other words, if there had there been no ARS, the organization would have individually mapped them to Cost Center Cc-Admin.

When an employee swipes at another attendance booth: But sometimes, an employee may swipe out at an attendance booth other than the one to which he/she logically belongs. This could be due to one of the following two reasons

• The employee has been deputed to another function/group for a certain period, and therefore swipes at the attendance booth installed for this function / group

• The employee, although still with the same function / group as before, has physically moved to another floor due to lack of space, etc. and swipes from the attendance booth on this floor.

In the first instance, no corrective action needs to be taken. When the employee is deputed to another function / group, his/her costs must be logically assigned to this group for the duration of the deputation.

In the second instance, the employee logically still belongs to the same cost center. Therefore, you need to ensure that his/her attendance details reach this cost center. To accomplish this, you are to manually specify the logical cost center of the employee during payroll processing. The “Enter Employee Costing Details - Cost Center wise” activity must be used for this purpose.

Prerequisites, before mapping an attendance booth to a cost center: You are to make sure that

• The ARS exists, and it records vital details such as the booth number of each booth, swipe-in and swipe-out timings and the employee code of each employee.

• The integration of the ARS to Ramco HR is affirmed in the HR System Parameters activity

• Cost centers are defined in Ramco HRMS.

• You have indicated the Mapping Booth to Cost Center activity to be in use, in the HR System Parameter activity.

Sequence of Steps: When the “Map Attendance Booth-Cost Center” page appears, you are to select the organization unit for which attendance booths must be mapped to cost centers.

Subsequently, you are to specify the booth number for each booth, and the code of the specific cost center to which the booth must be mapped.

Ensure that the booth number you enter is in the identical format in which the ARS records it.

For each mapping of cost center to booth, you are to enter the start date and optionally the end date of the date range. To unmap the cost center and booth at any time, simply enter the end date of this mapping period, to indicate that the mapping period is ended. Any time later, you can map the two again, by entering it as a separate record

Modify: To modify a cost center-booth mapping, it is recommended that you either

• Delete the existing record, provided it has not been used in transactions, or

• Close the existing record by specifying the end date, and enter a fresh record

View: After you map cost centers to booths for the first time, note that whenever you subsequently enter the “Map Attendance Booth-Cost Center” page you can request the system to display the list of attendance booths already mapped to cost centers.

Getting familiar with the pages inside  

Each of these tasks is described in the following section

Prerequisites

Cost center must have been defined in the “Create Cost Center” activity. 

What you can do in this activity

Map/Unmap a cost center to attendance booth

Map/Unmap a cost center to attendance booth

You can map/unmap an attendance booth to a cost center in the “Map Attendance Booth – Cost Center” page.

•  Specify the booth numbers and the cost centers that are to be mapped with each other.

• Specify the period for which they must be mapped.

•  Save the details entered