Business goals contain the business goal parameters, targets, forecasts, and results. The variable pay module requires this information to determine the goal level payouts which impact the bonus calculation. Business goals can be created in the admin interface or imported.
Create Business Goals in the Admin Interface
The easier option for administrators is to use the admin interface to add business goals. This option is more convenient when adding one or two business goals or if you want to modify an existing business goal without the need to import the entire file. In creating a business goal, eligibility field and value dropdowns will reflect all fields included in the employee history. This is used to cascade the goals to individual employees.
When creating business goals, the administrator can also add a Forecasting Result. This can contain payout function types of direct, interpolate, or step. When adding a forecasting result, a graphical representation of the payout is also visible.
To create via import or admin navigate to Plan Setup→Manage Plan Details→Business Goals.
Create Business Goals using an Import File
When importing business goals from a file, keep in mind that the Business Goal Import file contains information that relates to other data:
- The Name column relates to Business Goal Name in the Weights & Mappings Data file.
- The Lookup Field column relates to the column header Employee History Data file.
- The Lookup Value column relates to the lookup field value in the Employee History Data file.
Column C is the User ID of an admin user who will not be inactivated in the system and should be the same for all participants. As a point of information, this user will receive multiple email notifications each time business goals are imported (assuming the appropriate email notifications templates are enabled). For this reason, you may want to create a unique admin user whose only function is to "hold" all of the business goals for the company (and for whom you can set up an invalid email address so no one gets spammed!).
Column F is the goal plan id for the variable pay program and automatically updated during the cloning process.
When the business goals file is imported, there is an option to Delete all business goals for the program prior to import. Select this option only if you would like to do a full file replacement of all business goals for all employees; otherwise, imported business goals will be appended to the existing ones in the system. It is strongly recommended that a full file replacement be done each time, so this option should generally be selected.
A sample import file is available in the admin interface.
Note
The business goal weights file (discussed in the following section) needs to be re-imported every time after importing a business goals file
.