Travis County Commissioners Court
October 2, 2007
Item 24
24 is to receive briefing regarding Travis County employee self-service application.
>> thank you. I'm going to briefly introduce and my systems staff is going to give you a brief demo of this. One of the things that we consistently look at with financial information is to see if there is something that can be more efficiently done utilizing technology. And we have developed a number of applications to do this. This is our latest. And will touch basically every employee in the county in terms of being able to look up things for themselves instead of taking staff time to do that. Charles vaughn is here and I'm sure he would agree that our office gets many, many phone calls asking these kind of questions, as do the personnel liaisons. So without further ado, let me turn this over. This is christina adanir, womb you have seen before, who is the head of our systems division. Next to her is robin right, who is a business consultant and both of these people will be working on the new financial system and have been working on these applications.
>> good morning, Commissioners, thank you for your tile. We're going to make this brief but still give you a feeling for what it is we've been working on. What started this, over the years I received numerous requests from department employees, if there isn't a way for them to get access to the information about themselves, be able to print certain things that they need for mortgage applications, whatever it is, instead of always having to rely on picking up the phone and trying to either find the payroll liaison, somebody in the payroll department. What we did, we said seems like there is enough employees out there who have computer savvies in and could use a web application to look up information about themselves. What we have designed here is exactly that. We realize that there is a large group of employees that are not going to be able to use this either because they don't have enough computer knowledge or access to computers. We are not saying this is it and phone support is now gone. That is not what we are saying. We are giving employees that want to have this as a tool to get information about themselves in a more timely and easy manner. So sort of empowering the employee to look up information about themselves. It's important to know this is view only. No employee ever needs to be worried about they are actually altering information about themselves in the payroll system. They can feel free to click around. They are never going to do any damage to any information about themselves. Strictly view only. It's also each employee only. This is not for management to use. This is me, the employee, who provides information to sign in about myself. I am the only one who can view information about myself. It's not for my managers to go look up information. That has been a little bit of a confusion too too. We did this all in house within our own department. And during the summer we have been rolling it out department by department, taking feedback, because like I always say, we're numbers people in our department so we are not always the best at communicating these kinds of information. So we have taken input from the departments as far as how we better could deliver some of the information. We're doing straight from ht so an employee sees up to the second information that we have on the payroll system. Now I'm going to the turn it over to robin so she can sort of give you a brief flavor of what it is that the employee can look up about themselves.
>> hi, my name is robin wright. The handouts are all the screen prints because I know it will be easier to see that on the tv. We had its add a link on the internet side so employees can easily go out there and find it. Once they click on they log in using their employee i.d. And password. Their i.d. If they don't know, it's going to be on their paycheck and also on their time sheet. So it's easy for them all to get to it. Once you lolge in you have these options of information you can see. I'm only going to be able to go through some because this is very personal payroll data about each individual employee which is why you shouldn't go around giving out your password. People can get into it. If you click on basic and contact information you can see the officially name payroll has on file for you, birth date. Contact information will show the address on file. Good idea for all employees to go out at end of the year and verify the correct address so you get the w 2 made. E-mail address, phone number. Under employee data, history down there contains all the information of your entire history at Travis County for the past ten years. So for applying for a mortgage you need salary and employment history, can you print out by yourself. Under current shows things like your pay grade, salary, title, all that information. Can you also print that if you need to. Just print the screen. Under pay statements, we started archiving pay statements for everyone as of January 1 of this year. So if you need any of your pay statements for the past calendar year, you can go in here and print them yourself. I'm not going to go any farther than that you can see you can select from any of them and print them out.
>> she is careful what she is looking at.
>> yes.
>> it is available there generally two days before tay day so the employee can go out there and see. It looks like your printed copy. You know, if it's direct deposit or your pay statement it has all that information.
>> direct deposit, if you want to verify that you changed your bank account with payroll, verify that they have the correct bank information, can you go in there and verify those changes. Supplemental pay would contain any, tra pay you receive such as cell phone allowance, it has that detail. The longevity pay shows the last date and the amount and then your projected next one. So if you are wondering your anniversary is rolling around and you want to wonder how much it's going to be, it does have that. It is an estimate because obviously if you leave or something changes, that would also change. Under w 2, just like the paycheck stubs, can you print the w 2. We have last year's out here and next year we will have that. You can print those yourself if you need to. Your withholding, apparently a lot of employees cage withholding frequently so this is a great way to verify if payroll has reported the changes the allowances. If you need to change it you can see what the current one is and how you need to add just for future. Overtime and comp schedule. It's going to show you if you are an exempt employee, just going to show you you have no schedule. But if you do earn overtime, it will show you, I worked on January 1, I'm therefore going to get paid overtime on January 31. For those on delayed, with drade payroll and especially the 28 day cycle it's hard for them to figure out when am I going to get paid for the work I did. This helps them.
>> what we did is ask payroll what are the top questions that you get over and over, you know, over the phone. And this was definitely the top, one of the top questions, employees get confused as to when the overtime that they perceive they earned this pay period but it doesn't get paid out until many weeks down the line, which is confusing to employees. We're trying to make that as clear to them as we can. If you work these days, this is when the overtime is going to show up.
>> under the insurance tab there are four buttons across the top for health insurance, life insurance, dental and disability. Under each one you can click and see what you are currently having deducted, what coverage you have under life insurance. We did make sure and add the $50 000 the county provides so that shows up on everybody's now. Can check that on any insurancewhat we tried to do, because it's so limited in how good a description we can have, as I'm sure you have heard the pay stub it's cryptic. So we tried to provide better and clearer descriptions about the provider of the insurance and what is it that you actually have signed up for. Tried to make that easier for an employee to understand.
>> the detection link has three tabs across the top, one for before tax dedirections, one for after tax, and one for ap the income tax. Employees can see the retirement or deferred comp, after tax, any kind of charitable dedirections or court orders, and the federal social security and medicare. Lead time, this is one of my favorite. You can go in under all the categories of leave time, personal vacation, sick, comp and holiday, and see the balance as of the last pay period, and click on the detail button and see when did I take the leave. If it's toward the end of the year you may not remember when you took vacation at beginning of the year and that gives you a running record. Some departments have said that's a good way, they are having employees print out the screen and attach with leave requests so they can verify the employee does have those balances available.
>> overtime was one of the top questions, probably the top question that we answered the most, that the payroll liaison confirmed they answer too, about leave time. How much leave do I have, you know, available. Hope this will be able to cut down some of these phone calls.
>> then we have a link tab which we talked to payroll, what are some of the common forms you're having to interoffice mail and fax to people. We put pdf versions of all those out here and adding more as departments come up with them. So if you need to change the w 4 you can go straight out here, click on the link, and it will take you to the forl and you can print those out and turn them i.
>> like I said earlier, you can't change anything about yourself. We haven't taken, we're still working through the forms to make changes. It's view only at this point in time.
>> most of these forms still require an actually significant so you would have to print them out and turn them in anyway.
>> if you want to cage your address you still have to get the form and sign it and turn it in. We are not allowing you at this stage, anyhow, to change your address on line.
>> we also tried to add some of the links to common internal sites, budget rules, internet, things like that that people would need, to kind of make it a within---a one-stop shop. Finally, if we want to see something like information on date of birth, you can click on that. It will help guide people along.
>> if you forget your birthday.
>> some of us try to.
>> be sure everybody will get you the presents.
>> now that I have broadcast mine everywhere.
>> if you need information about the deferred compensation, it says select before tax button.
>> uh-huh.
>> what information would be available there?
>> if you follow, let me go back to that. It's going to take you to the page. One of those with three buttons across the top. You have to click on before tax butten and you see deferred comp how much is taken out of the check, the year to date amounts, that sort of thing.
>> okay.
>> and we have made some changes based on feedback we have gotten from the departments as we have rolled this out, where they said this is not clear enough or we really would like the see this piece at a higher level. The w 4 information is an example of that. The departments requested we made that more visible in the big menu. So we are still taking requests for improvements if there's something that somebody sees that is unclear or we need to explain a different way or maybe show it in a different place. Then we are certainly open to that.
>> okay.
>> this is already up and running.
>> yes, it's available to everybody in had the county. We realize that there are lots of employees that don't have the equipment, but we feel there's a large enough body of employees that can that it makes sense to do this.
>> a good idea to go out and click on your own and verify that everything payroll has on you is correct.
>> great.
>> so for the employee who has a computer available to get this information today, the employee needs.
>> employee i.d. And password they use to sign onto the computer in the morning. The novel password. We worked with its on that. We are working with the same infrastructure that we have, that you sign on with in the morning.
>> and the password changes periodically but that is fine with this service.
>> yes, it keeps getting in sync with this so that the employee only has to remember the one password that they sign on to the network in the morning and then the employee i.d.
>> which you get from any pay stub.
>> yes.
>> sounds simple enough to me.
>> thank you very much.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 18:30 AM