ODU Research Foundation Payroll Authorization Application
The ODU Research Foundation strives to collaborate with the university for the successful administration of sponsored programs by providing responsive and cost-effective support. As part of that mission, the Research Foundation is responsible for the administration of project funds for all salaried and hourly positions funded through the variety of grants, contracts, and sponsored programs.
The ODU Research Foundation Payroll Authorization system, or ePAS as it’s called internally, is an application designed to manage payroll authorization and simplify the complex approval process associated with payroll for hundreds of actively funded projects at any given point in time through the Research Foundation. Each project has specific guidelines that must be followed in careful compliance for a variety of purposes, including funding for all types of employees – salaried or hourly, full-time or part-time, student or non-student, etc. The combination of these factors results in a wide variety of employee types and an even greater array of rules related to each employee type at various approval steps along the way. ePAS keeps track of a complex combination of roles and permissions to finely tune access for thousands of users to all aspects of the system.
Features
- Automated routing of approvals
- Built-in notifications
- Custom dashboards
- Real-time validation
- Built-in compliance
- Strong business rules
ePAS is integrated into ODU Research Foundation’s core ERP system for Accounting, HR and Sponsored Programs. The system ensures that payroll assignments comply with this information or provides additional information required to approve a change in assignment dates, pay rate, or other relevant aspect of the assignment and funding sources. ePAS provides a high degree of flexibility within the boundaries of contract management and compliance. ePAS also provides real-time validation to alert users of potential budget overages by comparing budget against actual and encumbered amounts for each project. ePAS data is integrated into the Research Foundation’s payroll encumbrance process and delivers required information for future payroll encumbrances to ensure visibility of available funds throughout the project life cycle.
ePAS is part of a larger Research Foundation Portal which provides thousands of users’ online access to real time and data. ePAS was built on MVC 4 using .NET 4.5, SQL Server 2012, Entity Framework 6, a few open source UI tools, and some custom JavaScript.
