The Employee Portal is an optional feature that allows employees to view and manage their personal information online. Some of the available features include:
- Submit purchase orders for approval
- Make changes to their tax withholding
- Request time off
- Update direct deposit bank account information
- View pay stubs
Any employee with an email address may log in to the Employee Portal and request changes. Changes should go through an approval process to ensure that the appropriate employees are notified of each request.
To set up the Employee Portal, you should go through the following steps:
Set up approval processes
Approval processes are necessary to ensure that employees cannot change data without consequence; it defines the employee(s) who must approve any change made by a user in the Employee Portal.
The approval process for each type of data is unique and may consist of multiple employees. When multiple employees are selected for a single approval process, the data is sent to the top employee first, and proceeds down the chain after approval, until the final approver assents. Each approver will receive a notification through email and on the Financials Main page when it is their turn to approve or reject the request.
It is highly recommended to configure all approval processes before enabling the Employee Portal. If an employee submits a W-4 update but no W-4 approval process exists, the change will occur without any notification to other users, so no one would catch an error such as an employee accidentally entering 50 allowances instead of $50 additional withholding.
To define an approval process:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Approval Processes
- Edit
- Enter the Approver’s name or check Creator’s Supervisor
- Supervisors are assigned at Financials Main > Human Resources > Employees - Single View, in the Positions tab
- If the action should be approved by multiple employees, use the blue plus sign to add additional steps
- In the PO approval process, you may designate one of the approvers to have their name appear on the printed PO
- Save
Enable the Employee Portal and permissions
The Employee Portal and its components can be enabled or disabled whenever necessary by a Financials User with “Modify Setup” permission. Upon enabling the portal, you will see a list of different pages within the Employee Portal that can be enabled or disabled.
To enable the Employee Portal:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Employee Portal Settings
- Edit
- Check “Allow Employees to Use Employee Portal”
- Check the permissions below to indicate which areas of the portal should be available to employees
- Save
The ability to request time off requires an additional permission:
- Go to Financials Main > Human Resources > Time Off Options
- Edit
- Check “Employees Can Request Time Off Through ESSP”
- Choose a Minimum Notice to Request Time Off
- Choose an employee who should be notified when a teacher requests a specific substitute
- Save
Manage users
Every individual whose name is in the Financials system is considered an employee. In order to access the Employee Portal, an employee must be turned into a user with an email address. An email address is necessary because it serves as the username when the employee logs in.
There are two user roles that can be managed in the Financials system:
- Employee Portal User: Allows the user access to the Employee Portal
- Financial User: Allows the user access to the Financials system, in an admin capacity. When adding this role, select additional permissions on the right to decide what areas they should have access to.
To create users:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Users
- Mass Create Users
- Enter an email address for each employee who does not currently have an email address
- By default, these users will receive an email invitation to log in after saving. If you do not want them to log in yet, uncheck “Email invitations for new users to log in” at the top
- Save
If an employee has never logged in before, you should send an invitation/welcome email. This is particularly useful if you created new users before the Employee Portal had been enabled.
To invite users to log in:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Users
- Mass Invite
- Check the employees who should receive invitations
- You may want to filter the “Welcome Sent” column to display only people who have not yet received an invitation/welcome email.
- Send Email
When an employee should no longer have access to the Employee Portal, you can either deactivate or delete the user’s role. The user’s experience is identical no matter which option you choose (they will not be able to log in), so the choice refers to intended permanence of the change. If an user’s access should be temporarily restricted, it’s better to deactivate them. If you don’t intend for the user to ever access the Employee Portal again, it’s better to delete them. However, their role can be re-created after deletion if necessary.
To deactivate Employee Portal access for an individual employee:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Users
- Edit a user
- Uncheck “Active”
- Save
To delete the Employee Portal User role:
- Go to Financials Main > Setup > Users
- Click the down arrow next to a user and Delete
- Check Employee Portal User and/or Financial User
- SIS roles, such as Admin and Instructor, cannot be deleted from this page
- Delete