AP UCPath: Fall to Winter Reminders and Best Practices

11/05/2021
 

TO: UCSB UCPath Transactors 

FR: UCSB Academic Personnel Office 

RE: AP UCPath: Fall to Winter Reminders and Best Practices

AP UCPath Fall to Winter Reminders and Best Practices

UCPath Deadlines, Processing Freeze Dates, and Proactive Action:

November and December tend to be hectic with holiday closures, year-end activities like fiscal close and open enrollment, and this year’s system upgrades. It is important to proactively review any upcoming actions needed that impact employee pay and benefits, and initiate transactions in advance to allow for all campus approvals and UCPC processing in order to avoid erroneous terminations or appointment extensions that lead to pay and benefit issues. Please review the dates and deadlines outlined below, as well as the Best Practices around appointment end dates, Lecturer appointments, and ASE 4-month employees in the fall to determine the best timing for department actions to facilitate the best result for employees.

Holidays and Transaction Deadlines:

The AP Office will be closed on the holiday and office closure dates are listed below. Please submit all necessary transactions by the AP Deadlines listed to ensure appointments are set up correctly and pay and benefit impacts are addressed prior to holidays and office closure dates.

Holidays

• Thursday, November 11^th, Veterans Day

• Thursday, November 25^th, Thanksgiving

• Friday, November 26^th, Day after Thanksgiving

• Thursday, December 23^rd, Winter Holiday

• Friday, December 24^th, Winter Holiday

• Thursday, December 30^th, New Year Holiday

• Friday, December 31^st, New Year Holiday

AP Office Closure:

The AP Path team will be observing the winter holiday soft closure dates between Thursday, December 23^rd through Sunday, January 2^nd. Any December pay impacting actions are due by Tuesday, 12/21/21 at 10:00 am to ensure processing is finalized in time for the 1/3/22 paycheck. This includes UCPath Cert requests to remove the auto-termination flag for appointments that are pending extension approvals/post-audit.

AP-Path PayPath Transaction Deadlines

UCPath Upgrade Project and Freeze Dates

UCPath is scheduled to undergo a systemwide upgrade in December.  The system will not be accessible from 12:00 pm Friday, 12/10/21 through 6:00 am Monday, 12/13/21 while the central project teams are managing the cutover.

For the most up-to-date information on the UCPath Upgrade project, please visit https://www.ucpath.ucsb.edu/technology-insider.

Expected Job End Dates

Departments are responsible for monitoring appointments with upcoming end dates and taking appropriate action to extend continuing appointments, terminate ending appointments, or apply a Short Work Break (SWB). Proactive action is necessary to avoid unintended impacts such as erroneous terminations, missed-/over-payments, loss of benefits, or system access interruptions. Refer to the End Date Monitoring job aid in the Resources for Department Analysts>UCPath section of the AP website for additional guidance.

Academic student employees appointed on a 9/12 basis for fall:

Academic student employees who are appointed on a 9/12 basis for fall that will continue into the winter quarter will need to have the Comp Frequency changed from UC912 to UC_9M effective January 1, 2022, via a PayPath action. If this change is not processed in time for January payroll processing, the employee will be overpaid. See the ASE 4-Month Pay in Fall Job Aid for additional guidance.

Lecturer process for winter quarter:

To assist with the timely processing of Lecturer appointments and reappointments, and to ensure 9-month appointments are set up correctly in time for the January pay deadline, appointment/workload paperwork must be received by the AP Policy Analysts by December 15^th, 2021. Paperwork received after this deadline may not be finalized in time for the January paycheck, and additional action may be necessary when overpayments and missed payments occur. Departments are responsible for identifying pay issues and initiating over- and missed-pay via BFS ServiceNow.

AB119 – Location and Cubicle Updates

Under California Assembly Bill 119, the University has a legal obligation to provide accurate and timely information about the physical work location of represented employees to their respective unions.

Mass Uploads for Location and Cubicle field updates – Data due to AP by 11/10/21

A communication was sent to department Managers and Business Officers with instructions on how to review and request updates to the Location and Cubicle fields for represented academic employees to ensure information is accurate and up-to-date for all required union reporting. Please refer to the instruction emails for details.

• Represented academic non-student employee Location and Cubicle field changes must be submitted via the Data Collection spreadsheet provided in the communication referenced above.
• Academic Student Employees can be updated via Case AND PayPath or the Spreadsheet/Mass Upload process:
• Cubicle field changes can be processed via PayPath or the Spreadsheet/Mass Upload (more than 10)
• Location field changes on single headcount positions can be processed via PayPath or the Spreadsheet/Mass Upload (more than 10)
• Location updates to multi-headcount positions must be requested via a Case with UCPC:
• Submit a Position Update form for each multi-headcount position that requires an update to the Location field.
• Include a comment to the UCPath Center that campus cannot make this update because the position change does not cascade to the job data for the individual incumbents.
• Complete Section 3 of the Position Update form to have active incumbent records updated with the Location data point.
• For positions with more than 3 incumbents, we recommend including a spreadsheet with the same data points shown in section 3, and include comments in the Case notes and on the Position Update form informing UCPC that a spreadsheet was included with additional incumbent information.

The data collection spreadsheets for all employee data changes must be submitted to ap-path@ucsb.edu by the 11/10/21 deadline to ensure the information is updated in UCPath by the required deadline.

Cubicle Field on SS Smart Transactions:

The Cubicle field has been added to Hire templates in the SS Smart Transactions available in UCPath. Departments are responsible for inputting any cubicle or office location detail in the Cubicle field on the Template at the time of hire.

Ongoing Maintenance of Location, Cubicle, and Reports To fields – Process Change Coming Soon

To ensure accurate data collection for the initial set up of new academic non-student appointments in UCPath, and streamlined maintenance of the work location fields, AP will be implementing some process changes in the new year. More information is coming soon!