Automation of AP Paycycles

Has anyone come up with a way to automate paycycles?  Years ago the Lights Out Paycycle worked for me at some clients.  But it appears not to be as good now as it used to be.  Now I am the client and not a consultant anymore.  My AP team runs 4 paycycles per day and spends way too much time actually executing the paycycles.  Additionally, human error occurs far to often when alternate people run the paycycle.  So I am trying to eliminate errors as well as to free up resources from this repetitive tasks.  Any suggestions welcome.

We recently implemented a lights out process for PSAP for our claims payment processing.  The paycycles run on a scheduled basis (every two hours during a work day) which is controlled by Business Process Automation which connects the payment requests from our claims system and Peoplesoft Accounts Payable.  Our PS developers created integration tables which populate with the necessary information from our claims center and then built a process job for PS AP which includes all the steps including the paycycle step, distribution of trial registers, payment verification reports and remittances (we have to print Explanation of benefits with many of our claims payments), compliance screening (OFAC), and positive pay.  Most check payments are single pay, but once a day we also run a lights out pay cycle job for claims EFTs and once a week check payments which use AP suppliers.  The payment date is derived from Claims Center as such - Single Pay checks and EFT pay when created while Supplier based checks and EFTS are based on the defined schedule established for the AP Supplier (we created a custom selection for Claims associates to select frequency - weekly, bi-weekly, monthly).  We've only been at it for a month and have had to tweek the process a few times to fix what where mainly reporting or remittance printing issues.  Otherwise is working well.  Happy to share more information (by channeling my wise developer) if anyone is interested in hearing more about our process.

We created a custom job that runs the following processes:

• AP_PSTVCHR - PS/AP voucher Posting

• APPCJOB - Paycycle job,

  • AP_APY2015

  • AP_PCJOB

• then a custom app engine that finalizes payments and updates run controls to increment the pay selections dates

• AP_PSTPYMNT

This runs nightly.

We have built scripts to run AE and SQR programs via the control-M scheduling system and run the AP pay-cycle automatically several time each day.  We did have to build some simple programs to maintain run-control information on the tables, but run all the scheduled processes under a batch user id.

Alicia,

I think using the Pay Cycle Jobs probably is your best bet. You just have to figure out your date issues.

Claro Siriban

Phone: 516.776.0185

Email: <a>csiriban@meyercgrp.com</a>

I would be very interested in hearing what processes you run to get your paycyles to be run in lights out mode. We run all of our manually and there are always issues. We started using Pay Cycle Jobs for some of our ACH runs, but still run into date issues sometimes.

Alicia Kinsey

Manager, Financial Business Systems

KAR Auction Services, Inc.

Email: alicia.kinsey@KARAuctionServices.com

We run our paycycles lights out every night via batch.  They are schedule through the Run AE Engines page.  The users define the batch paycycle selection criteria and then we run the payments.  We then get back 824 reports from the bank.   Which part of the automation are you having trouble with?