Absence plan
ConceptintermediateThe rules for accruing leave time and for paying during an absence period. Six plan types exist — accrual, qualification, no entitlement, agreement, compensatory and donation — and they are alternatives rather than layers of one another.
What people get wrong
The confusions are the difficulty. Each one is a belief that sounds right and is not.
- That a plan accrues balance. Only an accrual plan does; a qualification plan decides entitlement and payment, and a no entitlement plan deliberately tracks neither.
- That a no entitlement plan replaces a qualification plan. It can be used in combination with one, which is the point of it.
- That a donation plan gives the donor a balance. It tracks the time the coworker receives.
Recall it
Name the six absence plan types and say which one accrues a balance, which one decides payment, and how a no entitlement plan is meant to be used.
Accrual, qualification, no entitlement, agreement, compensatory and donation. The accrual plan accrues time for paid leave and configures the accrual term, the maximum accruable in a term and the maximum carried forward to the next term. The qualification plan covers workers who qualify for it and receive payments during the absence, with payment percentages for specific periods during the absence for specific workers. A no entitlement plan tracks unpaid absences without an accrual balance or leave entitlements, and is used in combination with a qualification plan for a worker not eligible for the standard one. An agreement plan is created under statutory rules for an agreement, such as shared parental leave. A compensatory plan tracks earned compensatory time for work outside regular schedules instead of overtime. A donation plan tracks the donated time a coworker receives.
Memory hook: Accrue, Qualify, Track, Agree, Compensate, Receive. Alternatives, not a progression — the question is what the entitlement is based on.
Rests on ABS-PLAN-001, ABS-PLAN-002, ABS-PLAN-003, ABS-PLAN-004, ABS-PLAN-006, ABS-PLAN-007.
Taught in
- Absence Management: six components and a setup orderThe six objects an absence policy is built from, which of them actually decide entitlement, and the documented order to build them in — with the unit-of-measure rule that silently decides whether a plan and a type agree.
- The six absence plan types, and when each one is the right oneAccrual, qualification, no entitlement, agreement, compensatory and donation are alternatives rather than a progression — and the mistakes that come from reading them as one.
- Configuring an accrual plan: term, frequency, limits and carryoverThe eleven rule areas of an accrual plan, the two term types, the two balance frequency sources, the five carryover limit rules, and the difference between the annual accrual limit and the ceiling — using Oracle’s own vacation-plan example as the worked case.
- Who may enroll: eligibility profiles and derived factorsHow an eligibility profile decides who can enroll in an absence plan and who can schedule its absences: create derived factors first, build the profile with include/exclude criteria, and remember that absence plans accept several profiles while an absence type accepts exactly one.
- Certifications: the action items that gate continued payHow an absence certification requirement works: created with the Absence Certifications task and associated with an absence type on its Action Items tab, it triggers on demand or on the absence start date, runs through three phases that set a target status field and can reevaluate entitlements (override, recalculate, retract) — and it exists only for illness/injury and maternity absence types.
- Rate definitions: what one unit of absence costsHow a rate definition prices a single unit of absence — categories (Derived Rate, Element, Value by Criteria, Grade Rate, Formula), contributors with periodicity and factors, conversion to the return periodicity, and min/max rules — which of the four absence payment rate rules reference it, and why the rate is only resolved in payroll, never in Absence Management itself.
- Qualification plans: paying an absence with no balanceThe plan type that pays workers who qualify for it during an absence without accruing a balance — the four rule areas (term, eligibility, enrollment/termination, payments), the four term types and when each applies, the overlap rules that decide how straddling absences count on rolling-backward terms, the entitlement band matrix that maps worker criteria to duration and payment percentage, and open-ended absences calculated for 365 days.
Related
- Absence Plan — in the terminology glossary
- Terminology glossary — what a term means, and what people get wrong when they use it