What Is Labor Distribution?

Employees may work on projects from multiple funding sources, including more than one grant activity. You can use labor distribution to accurately charge salary expenses based on the time and effort employees spend on various projects.

Labor distribution is the process of charging percentages of an employee’s salary to the grants activities and specific general ledger accounts (departments) that fund the employee’s salary when payroll is processed.

During the payroll cycle, labor distributions are applied to employee time records. This functionality lets you create one time record per employee and have the employee's actual earnings from that time record automatically charged to the grant activities and general ledger accounts in the labor distribution template that is in effect for the time record.

For labor distribution to occur, you must complete the following setup steps:

• Set the Human Resources employee record for labor distribution on Grant Management (HR11.3).

• Assign a labor distribution template to the employee. A Labor Distribution Template is always defined for an employee and effective date. Optionally, it can also be defined for a job code, position, or a pay code. The distribution lines are approved by a manager or Principal Investigator (PI). Finally, when you complete the payroll cycle (by running Payroll Close (PR197) for Lawson Payroll or Non-Lawson Payroll Tran Import (GM500) for non-Lawson payroll), the program uses employee time records to charge actual wages to grant activities and/or general ledger accounts you identified in the labor distribution template.