Your Chris21 reports will only be as good as the selections you make. Selections tell the report designer what to include in the report output. If your selections are wrong, your report will be wrong.

In many cases, the selections are quite simple. For instance, creating a report to show all employees who started after a specific date.

Of course, not all Chris21 reports are this straightforward. Some can be complex and it can take some thought to make the correct selections.

There are just three connections that can be used in your report selections, AND, OR and BOR. Let’s have a look at a few examples of how and when to use each.

Use the AND connection when two or more conditions must met:

If you want to include employees who are males and who are under 35 years of age:

Gender    Equals          Male      AND

Age        Less Than     35

Output: All males who are under 35

Use the OR connection when either of two or more conditions must be met:

If you want to include employees who are males or who are under 35 years of age:

Gender    Equals          Male      OR

Age        Less Than     35

Output: All males, plus all females who are under 35

Use a combination of AND and OR when the first two or more conditions must be met (if connected with AND) or the subsequent conditions must be met:

If you want to include employees who are males and who started after 31/12/1998 and are under 35 years of age, along with employees who are female:

Gender    Equals              Male                  AND

Joined     Greater Than     31/12/1998         AND

Age        Less Than         35                     OR

Gender    Equals              Female

Output: All males who started after 31/12/1998 and are under 35, plus all females.

BOR is essentially a bracketed OR. Use the BOR connection when some conditions must be met and there is a choice between other conditions:

If you want to include employees who are males and who are under 45 years of age or over 59 years old, the following conditions appear to describe the task:

Gender    Equals              Male      AND

Age        Less Than         45         OR

Age        Greater Than     59

Output: All males who are under 45, plus all employees who are over 59.

The output is incorrect. With these conditions the report will show all males who are under 45, but will also show all employees, male or female, who are over 59. This is clearly wrong as the requirement is for males only.

If you want to include employees who are males and who are under 45 years of age or over 59 years of age:

Gender    Equals              Male      AND

Age        Less Than         45         BOR

Age        Greater Than     59

Output: All males who are under 45 or over 59.

The output is now correct. The BOR tells the report to select only males but those males must be either under 45 or over 59.

Let’s look at a more complex example:

For budgeting purposes, the Finance Director needs to know how many male employees are in higher classifications in one of his areas of responsibility. The report must show all male employees who work in the following Business Units: Financial Reporting (FCB), Financial Management (FCC) or Financial Services (FCD). Of these employees, only those in Classification ASO6 or greater should be shown.

This would be written in your Report Designer selections as:

Gender            Equals             Male      AND

Classification    Greater Than    ASO5    AND

Bus Unit          Equals              FCB      BOR

Bus Unit          Equals              FCC      BOR

Bus Unit          Equals              FCD

You can see how BOR can be used to great effect to produce quite complex Chris21 reports with minimal selections. I would be interested to hear if you have any other examples where you have used BOR to good effect.

The post How to Create Powerful Chris21 Reports Using Complex Selections appeared first on System Logic.

In recent years, new functionality was added to Chris21 to enable easier loading of larger amounts of data (multiple thousands of records). This process is called GTR Batch Processor (RGT).

One of the difficulties of using the GTR process is the time it takes to load larger blocks of data. This is because the output is printed to the GTR Output Screen as each record is processed. While this is useful because you can see the process running and notice errors as they occur, it does slow the process down considerably.

With the GTR Batch Processor the data is loaded in the background. This means it will load quicker and also allows you to do other work in Chris21 while RGT is running.

Another very useful feature of the GTR Batch Processor is that it produces the following three output files:

• Success – reports all records that were successfully loaded in this process.
• Failures – reports all records that were unsuccessful and were not loaded in this process.
• GTRFail – reports all records that have failed. These can be corrected and re-loaded.

This is preferable to the GTR process where the output file that is produced shows all records, both successes and failures. You then have to sort through the file to find the errors.

On the downside, you will need access to your Chris21 DAT directory because you need to copy your GTR formatted text file to this location prior to starting the process. Output files will also be written to the DAT directory. If you don’t have access to this directory you will have to ask your system administrator to help.

Also be aware that any subsequent RGT processes will overwrite the existing output files in your DAT directory. Therefore you need to ensure you have removed these files after you run an RGT process and before you run the next one.

How to run the GTR Batch Processor

First you need to create your GTR input text file. My blog GTR Processing Guide explains how to do this.

Once your input file is ready, copy it into your Chris21 DAT directory. It’s a good idea at this point to make a backup of the file you are about to change. For instance, if you are loading Training History (TRH) records then you would backup EMTRH.DAT.

Login to Chris21 and go to the GTR Batch Processor form. In the Input File Name field enter the name of the GTR Input file that you have copied into your DAT directory. The default name for this file is GTRINPUT.TXT but you can rename it to whatever you want. Bear in mind that you only have 8 characters available for the file name.

Then click the Save button. It will not be immediately obvious that the process is running. You can check this by viewing the Scheduled Reports (SRP) form:

Click Refresh to check if the process has finished. You will know this when the process no longer appears in the list. Once the process has finished you can retrieve the output files from the DAT directory for review.

One other important note is that the RGT process is not optional. If you try to run a large file directly using the GTR process you will receive the following message:

In this case you must use RGT to load the input file.

Whether you are using GTR or RGT you will find that these processes are extremely efficient and will save you a great deal of time if you have to process bulk data into Chris21.

The post Using the GTR Batch Processor for Larger GTR Files appeared first on System Logic.

There are many instances where you will be presented with a list in Chris21. You will see a list of all of the employees in your Chris21 database whenever you access an employee based form, such as Details, Allowances, Leave Taken, etc. Or you might see a list of all of your Courses, Positions, or Allowance codes, depending on the type of form that you access. In a typical Chris21 database these lists can be very large. Quick Filters in Chris21 help to make these lists shorter and therefore more manageable when you are searching for information.

How to set up Quick Filters in Chris21

I will use the Position Table (PDT) list as an example. Click the Position Table tab (from the menu, Administration -> Organisation -> Position Table, or F6 -> PDT). You will see the list of all of the positions in your organisation. Right click anywhere on the list to open the sub-menu:

Create a Quick Filter. From the sub-menu click Quick Filter. In this instance, we will set the filter to display all Positions with Business Unit HAA. Therefore, the Field to add to the Quick Filter is Bus Unit. Click the drop down arrow on the Field lookup table to show the list of available fields and select Bus Unit.

Add the Operator and Value to your Quick Filter. In this example the Operator is Equals. Then select the Value. To do this, click the ellipse button to show the Bus Unit lookup table. Search for HAA in this list and double click to add to the Value field.

Click OK to run the Quick Filter over your list.

Review the new filtered summary list. It will display only those positions with Business Unit HAA.

When you want to remove your Quick Filter, right click anywhere on the list and select Quick Filter from the pop up menu. Click the Clear button.

Try Quick Filters in Chris21 as an easy way to limit the size of your lists and help with your searches.

The post Using Quick Filters in Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

You have many options for configuring the display of leave accruals in Chris21. Consider the screenshot below:

With this setup the annual leave accrual will become Current Entitlement each month on the employee’s anniversary date at a rate of 1.6666667 days per month. After 12 months the employee would have accrued 20 days annual leave (less any leave taken in the period). To determine how this accrual displays in Chris21 and HR21 look at the Accrual Frequency and Accrual Units fields. In our example, Accrual Frequency is set to 1 and Accrual Units is set to D (Days). This means that the Current Accrual will be displayed on a daily basis.

Your system might be configured so that the accrual doesn’t become an entitlement until the full year has been completed. This is done as shown below:

Regardless of when accrued leave becomes entitlement, the way accrued leave is displayed will be the same as in the first example. Both will show the Current Accrual balance increasing on a daily basis. The difference being that in the first example employees will receive their entitlement at the end of each month while in the second example they will have to wait until the end of each full year of service before they receive it.

But what if you don’t want to show the Current Accrual balance on a daily basis? You may have a requirement to show the balance at the end of each week or at the end of each month. To do this you need to adjust the Accrual Frequency and Accrual Units fields. The example below shows how to set these fields to display the balance accruing on a weekly basis:

In this example the employee will receive their entitlement after each full year of service, however the Current Accrual balance will be displayed on a weekly basis. If you wanted to display accruals monthly you would set Accrual Frequency to 1 and Accrual Units to M.

For some leave types you may not want to show accruing leave at all. This might be the case with Sick leave. You can hide Current Accruals from display and only show the Current Entitlement balance. To do this, select the Suppress Accruals checkbox:

In our example of Annual leave above, the leave will still accrue in the background but the Current Accrual will always display zero on the Balances (LAC) form in Chris21 and in HR21. Employees will be able to see their Current Entitlement balance in HR21 when they have reached their Next Entitlement Date.

Remember that changes to leave Accrual Rules (LVR) records will force Chris21 to recalculate leave balances for each employee from their service start dates. For this reason you should ensure that any changes are made in your test system. This way you are free to make changes and then review the effects of these changes prior to updating your production system.

The post Displaying Leave Accruals in Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

You configure Chris21 leave accruals using the Accrual Rules (LVR) form. Fortunately LVR offers many options for configuring accruing leave so you should be able to set yours up to meet your requirements.

If you’re not entirely satisfied with the way your Chris21 leave accruals have been setup it may be that you need to review LVR to determine if there is a better way of configuring your accruing leave. Since leave rules are setup when your Chris21 system is initially implemented, it’s not surprising that this type of review is necessary given that your organisation’s requirements for accruing leave may change over the years.

You also know it’s time to review your leave accruals if you are spending time manually adjusting leave to make sure it is calculated correctly. LVR, when set up correctly, will be able to accurately calculate each of your accruing leave types.

Before you make any changes to your accrual rules you need to have a good understanding of all of the functionality and how to use it.

An important note: be careful when changing your accrual rules setup because it will recalculate employee leave balances. It’s always advisable to make changes in your test system and check that the results are what you want before making any changes in your production system.

Below is a screenshot of the Chris21 Leave Accruals (LVR) form:

This is the typical setup for Sick leave accrual. In this example, Sick leave will accrue at 12 days per year. This will accrue in advance on 1^st July and happen once per year. You define this using the following fields:

Type is Advance, Days is the number of days of leave that is accrued, Period and Units is the period to elapse before the next entitlement is due. So from the example above you can see that Sick leave will accrue at 12 days once per year. Also that this accrual will be in advance, in other words, the 12 days accrued will be for the following 12 months. The other important setting here is the Entitlement Time. This is where you define the particular day that the entitlement is to be granted. If you leave this blank then the entitlement will be granted on the Service Start date for each employee.

The previous example was a very straightforward configuration. But what about a more complicated scenario such as long service leave? This is a good example of leave that will accrue differently depending on years of service.

For instance, a requirement for long service leave might be to accrue seven days per year for the first seven years. However, the entitlement is not granted until seven years service has been completed. After this time, leave will accrue at 15 days per year and the entitlement will be granted at the end of each completed year’s service. In this case, we need two LVR records to configure Chris21 to correctly calculate the accrual:

This is the first LVR record where the Period Length is set to seven years.  After an employee has completed seven years service the entitlement of 63 days will be granted. Type is Service, meaning the entitlement will be granted on the employee’s Service Start anniversary. Period and Unit is 7 years. Therefore the 63 days will become an entitlement after seven years service has been completed.

A second LVR record must be created to continue accruing long service leave after the first seven years:

The second LVR record will continue accruing long service leave at 15 days per year and this will be added to the entitlement at the end of each completed year of service.

You can add more LVR records to a leave type if the accrual rules are more complicated.

In my next blog I will describe the other important part of Chris21 leave accruals configuration. Namely, how an accrual will be displayed in employee leave balances. For instance, do you want the accrual to be displayed daily, weekly, monthly or on the anniversary of the Service Start date?

I mentioned earlier in this article that care must be taken when changing established accrual rules. This is because a change will cause Chris21 to recalculate the accrued leave for affected employees from their service start date. Therefore, a change could cause an increase or a decrease in the associated leave balances for employees. If this is the case, leave adjustments using the Adjustments (LVA) form may be required. You can contact me if you need more advice about this. Or leave a comment so that I can share the answer with other readers.

The post Chris21 Leave Accruals Configuration appeared first on System Logic.

Rather than each user having to search for the report in the report designer, you could attach this report to a menu so that it is accessible to all users who have been granted security access. This is firstly a matter of convenience – consider how difficult it can sometimes be to find a report from the hundreds that could reside in the report designer. And secondly, it reduces the risk of a user running the wrong report. This is also a great idea if you want to group a number of Chris21 reports onto a sub-menu, for example, Learning and Development reports.

To add your Chris21 reports to a menu follow these steps:

Note: These types of changes will usually be done by your Chris21 administrator. If you don’t have full security access to your system you will need some assistance from your administrator.

1. Set the report permissions. Make sure the permissions on your report are set to Allow modifications by non-owners. This is necessary so that other users can make changes to report selections, such as date ranges.
2. Create a new form. Create a new form using the Forms (SCN) form. Name your form beginning with the letter Z. This naming convention will ensure that your form will not be lost after future Chris21 upgrades. Associate your report with the new form as shown below: The areas to note in the screenshot above are the Form Type field which must be set to D for Designed Report and the Designed Report field which is the name of your report in the report designer.
3. Grant security access to the new form. You now need to setup the security access to this form, just like you would for any other form. Go to the Privileges (ATT) form and add Z01 to the relevant security profile. All users who have been assigned this security profile will now have access to the new form Z01.
4. Add the new form to the menu. Even though users now have access to the form, they still won’t see the form until it is added to their Chris21 menu. To do this, open the menu designer and the open the relevant menu. You may be using a copy of the master menu for all users or you may have specific menus for the various groups of Chris21 users in your organisation. See my blog How to Use the Chris21 Menu Designer for more information.

After following these steps all users in your group will now have access to your Chris21 report. Better still, they will be able to access the report and change any selections directly from the Chris21 menu without having to open the report designer and search for the report.

Try this functionality for a better way to share your Chris21 reports with your team.

The post How to Add Chris21 Reports to a Menu appeared first on System Logic.

If you are customising Chris21 forms there are two processes to consider. The first is the Data Dictionary (DMA) where you create the field on the Chris21 file and the second is Field Definitions (FLD), where you place your newly created field onto the Chris21 form. Last week in my blog Customising Chris21 the Right Way I discussed the first part of the process.

The key point of last week’s blog was to ensure that you create the field within the user area of the file so that your customisation will be safely retained after future upgrades. Failure to do this is probably the most common cause of customisation issues.

To complete the second part of the process, go to Field Definitions. Using the example from last week, we will place the field POS GRP NUM onto the Positions (POS) form. You will need to determine a few things before you start.

Firstly, decide where you want to place the field. Usually this will be under the last field on the form. If you want to place it in the middle then you will have to move all of the fields below your insertion point down one line. I usually will just add the new field after the last field for the sake of convenience. Look at your Positions form and note the last field:

In my example, the field is Review Type.  Now go to Field Definitions, select Ctrl F and type POS in the Find dialog box. From the list, find the field called Review Type:

Look for the column called Label Row. This will tell you which row Review Type is placed on. In the screenshot above the row is 27. Our new field will therefore go on row 28.

You also need to identify an appropriate field number for your new field. Be careful here because if you choose a field number that is already in use then either your new field will not be displayed or the existing field will be hidden and replaced by your new field. From the screenshot below look for the highest field number in the Field column and then add one to this number. This is the field number you will assign to your new field.

The highest field in use in our example is 49. We will use field number 50. You can now create the record to place your new field on the Positions form.

Go to Field Definitions and click New from the main menu. Enter the details for your new form as shown below:

You can see that I have used number 50 for the Field field and number 28 for the Label Row. Note also that the Data Row must also be 28 to ensure that your label and data are on the same row!

That’s all you need to do to create a new field on a form. To see the effects of your changes you will need to clear cache in Chris21. Notice that Group Number is now on your form under the Review Type field:

If you clear cache and still don’t see the changes try logging out and then back in.

This blog, along with the information in my last blog Customising Chris21 the Right Way will give you enough information to begin experimenting with basic Chris21 customisations. Of course, you should only do this in your test system until you become familiar with the process. Give this a try and let me know if you need any further information.

The post Customising Chris21 Forms – How to Place a Field onto a Form appeared first on System Logic.

I have written in the past about customising Chris21 and how to do it properly. From my experience I have seen many examples of bad customisations and have helped clients to fix these so that they don’t continue to cause problems in the future. My blog Chris21 Customisations – Do it Right, talks about this issue and explains the sort of problems you can experience with bad customisations.

The wrong way to create a new field in Chris21 is to take an existing field and use it for a different purpose. I can’t emphasise this enough. Sure it’s easy to grab a field that’s already there, rename the field and maybe even use it to store text rather than a numeric value. But it’s not that hard to create a new field either. Let me explain.

I will use the example of customising Chris21 by adding a new field onto a form. I always recommend that whenever you are customising Chris21 that you start in your test environment. Once you have done this and tested the results, you can then copy your changes into the production system.

The first thing to understand is that there are two areas on each Chris21 file, the system area and the user area. You don’t want to do your Chris21 customisations in the system area. I discuss this in my blog Customising Chris21 – What Can Go Wrong?

Your starting point is to find the start position of the user area of the file. You do this by viewing the File Table (FIL) entry for the Chris21 file you want to customise. As shown below, there is a field on the File Table entry called User Area Start.

In the example above, the User Area Start number is 1133. We will use this number later when we create the new field. The other important field is the Storage Size. In this example, the Storage Size of the EMPOS file is 122. This means you can add multiple fields to this file to a combined total of 122 characters.

Even though we can see that the User Area Start number is 1133, it is nevertheless very important that you confirm this before creating a new field in this location. You confirm this by reviewing the Data Dictionary (DMA) entries for the EMPOS file. To do this, go to DMA and from the list of Field Codes create a Quick Filter where Field Code equals EMPOS.

This will display all of the fields that are included on the EMPOS file. You must review all of the start positions to confirm that number 1133 hasn’t been used by previous customisations. If it has, keep looking in case there are more customised fields after 1133. When you have found the highest start position number that has been used in the user area, remember to add the field Storage Size onto this number. For instance, if the highest start position number is 1148 and this field’s Storage Size is 6, then the next available start position number is 1154.

Once you have the start position number you can begin to add your new field. Open DMA and click New from the main menu. A typical DMA entry that has been created for a numeric field is shown below.

As you can see, this field has been created at start position 1133 which is in the user area. If you wanted to add another field the start position will be 1135 – 1133 plus the 2 characters that the previous field used.

You now have a customised field that will not be adversely affected by future upgrades to Chris21. If you ensure all of your customisations are done this way you can be confident that customisation issues will be eliminated in future system upgrades.

This can be a difficult area if you have had limited experience customising Chris21. Leave a comment and let me know if you require some more information on this topic. In my next blog I will demonstrate how to place this new field on the Positions (POS) form ready for use.

The post Customising Chris21 the Right Way appeared first on System Logic.

There will be times when you will need to create a new menu using the Chris21 menu designer. The system does have what are called ‘Master’ menus that you can use, however you can’t make any changes to these. So it’s best not to use them.

The first thing to note is that there are two ways to create a new menu role. The first is to create the role from an existing role using a template. The second is to create one manually.

So how do you know which method to use?

You will use a template if the new role will be similar to an existing role. This will copy all of the menus from the existing role and therefore save you from having to start from scratch.

The only time you might prefer to create a menu role manually is if none of the existing roles in the system are similar to what you want. A good example of this would be a HR21 menu.

I’ll explain how to create menus using the Chris21 menu designer – you might be surprised how easy this is! Since the template method is the most common one, I will focus on that in this post.

Creating a new menu role

Before you copy a template you first have to create a new menu role to copy it to. Begin by creating a name for your new menu role. Open the Menu Designer and enter a code for the new role (maximum of 8 characters) in the Role field.  Press the tab key on your keyboard. The Code Not Found dialog box is displayed. Type the name of the new role in the Description field. Select Yes to save the new role:

Populate the new menu role from a template

To copy the menu items from a template to your new menu role, from within the Menu Designer click the Templates button. Select the menu you want to copy from the Template list. In this example select the Human Resources Menu (HR):

Drag the required menu items from the HR Template to the HRADMIN Role. In this example we will be using most of the menu items from the HR Template in the new role. We will copy the complete menu and then remove the items that are not required. To copy the complete menu, select Main Menu from the HR Template and drag and drop into the Main Menu on the HRADMIN Role:

The HRADMIN Role is now identical to the HR Role. You now need to delete the menu items and forms that are not required in the HRADMIN Role.

Amend the New Role

You might want to delete some of the menu items that you just copied over. For instance, you may not require the Administration menu. To delete the Administration menu, select Administration and then right click and select Delete from the pop up menu. Do the same to delete any other menu you don’t require:

You can also delete individual forms from within a menu. As shown in the image below, select the Leave menu. The Form Set will show all the forms currently attached to this menu. Select the Update Leave form tab and then right click and select Delete from the pop up menu. Do the same to delete any other forms you don’t want in your menu.

The new role HRADMIN has now been created. Close the Menu Designer.

Assign the new menu to users

A menu is assigned to a user via the User Access (USR) form in Chris21. Multiple users can be assigned the same menu. Follow these steps to assign a menu to a user.

Login to Chris21 and navigate to the USR form. Lookup the user record or create a new security record if one does not exist for this user. From the Menu Role field select the menu role you want to use:

Save the record. This user’s menu in Chris21 now looks like this:

One final note to remember. Access to forms in Chris21 is controlled by the Privileges (ATT) form. Even though a user has access to a menu containing various forms, a form will not appear in the user’s menu when logged into Chris21 or HR21 if that user does not have security access to the form via ATT.

If you’re new to the Chris21 menu designer and would like to become a more proficient user, work through this tutorial. You will quickly improve your skills in this area. If you need any further help just leave a comment and ask a question.

The post How to Use the Chris21 Menu Designer appeared first on System Logic.

There will be occasions when you will want to retrieve data from Chris21 that show specific calculations. Calculated Fields can help you to achieve this.

You might be asked to project a salary increase for a group of employees for budget purposes. In this example, you will need a calculated field to add the salary increase and show the increased salary in your report.

Name the Field Heading. This can be any name that best describes the field name. This will be shown as the column heading in the report output. I have called this one Salary + 4.5%.

Enter the Field Code. Choose the appropriate field code from the Data Dictionary. In this example I am creating a calculation that will increase the annual salary so I have selected the Annual field from SMN. To do this, click on the button on the Field Code to open the Field Chooser:

From the Field Chooser, open the Salary form and double click the Annual field.

Select the Operator. This tells the system what type of calculation is required. In our case it is the asterisk * character that will multiply the Annual salary by whatever value is entered in the Value field.

Enter the Value. We want to enter a calculation that increases the salary by 4.5% so we need to enter 1.045.

Save the record. Click the Save button to save the calculated field.

Access the list of calculated fields by clicking the Calculated Fields tab at the bottom of the Field Chooser form:

Locate the calculated field that we created from the list shown below. Double click the Field Name to add this calculated field to your report.

The post How to Use Calculated Fields in Your Chris21 Reports appeared first on System Logic.