| Pre-requisites: HR/FMC Role |
Topics Covered
Send to OPS
Payment Cable
Target Users
HR Admins
FMC Admins
Required Permissions
HR Roles/FMC Roles
Process to Pay for Approved OAS Awards
The payment process for approved awards in OAS is a two step process. First, the nominations which have been fully approved with a cash award are sent to OPS. This will generate the mass update for OPS to process the personnel actions for awardees. Second, Post HR or FMC (depending on which office handles award payments) will need to draft an official award payment cable and send to Charleston Global Financial Service Center (CGFS) or Regional Financial Service Center (RFSC). The process to send nominations to OPS for processing and send to CGFS/RFSC for payment is not automatic. Post HR must take action for payments to be made after all approvals are received.
- Assign an Effective Date to process in OPS.
- Send to OPS for processing.
- Exclude nominations which will be processed manually or those which are only for USDH employees.
- Manually enter any nominations which were excluded from Send to OPS but still require a personnel action.
- In OPS, HRO approve mass updates sent from OAS and any manually processed OPS actions.
- Generate the Finance Report from OAS.
- Review and edit Finance Report as needed, remove USDH from Finance Report (USDH are paid in eAwards, LE Staff are paid via official cable through payroll tech).
- Draft Awards Payment official cable and attach edited Finance Report.
- Send via SMART cable for payment to CGFS of RCFS as required.
- Confirm with Payroll tech the payment cable has been submitted and accepted.
Group Awards with USDH
Please keep in mind when processing award payments that group awards with LE staff and USDH will need to be processed for personnel actions and payments separately. All LE staff awards will be processed in OPS for personnel actions and payment will be completed via official cable. USDH will need to have another nomination submitted in eAwards, please talk to your HRO as access to eAwards is limited to USDH DOS employees.
Send to OPS
All awards will flow through the approval process before being sent to OPS for processing the personnel action. Annual Awards will be sent to HR and then flow through the JCAC Voting, after the JCAC Chair sign off on a nomination, the nomination will go to the EXEC for approval. If a cash award is attached to the nomination, the nomination will simultaneously flow through FMC for fiscal data and approval. Once the Annual Award has recieved fiscal data from the Pending Financial Information, FMO sign off and EXEC sign off, then the nomination will be sent to the Send to OPS queue for HR to take action.
Anytime Awards will be sent to HR then sent to Management Approver(s) and/or Anytime Approver(s). Once the Management Approver(s) and/or Anytime Approver(s) sign off, approved nominations with a cash award will then go to Pending Financial Information for fiscal data and FMO sign off. Then Anytime Awards will go to the Send to OPS queue for HR to take action.
You will need to take action by first deciding if you will create a mass update in OAS to send this data to OPS or if you will manually enter the data directly in OPS. If you choose to enter the data manually in OPS, then you can Exclude from Send to OPS. When you choose this option, the nomination will move to the Completed list in the HR Area.
If you will create the mass update in OAS to send all the nomination data to OPS, then you will need to assign an effective date for the nominations and then send the data to OPS to be processed.
Once the mass update has been created in OPS, the HRO will need to sign off as usual for OPS transactions. The mass update in OPS will NOT create a CGFS interface file for payment of the awards. This function has been disabled. Payment will still need to be done via official cable to CGFS/RGFS.
Assign Effective Date
From the left menu, go to HR Area and select Send to OPS. A list will appear with nominations which are waiting to be sent to OPS for processing. All approved nominations with a cash award will be sent to the Send to OPS queue, nominations which do not have a cash award will be sent directly to the Completed list in HR Area.
There are three actions you can take Assign Effective Date, Send to OPS, and Exclude from OPS.
If you look in the State column, you will notice the status of each nomination will be either Pending Effective Date or Pending Sending Data to OPS.
You will need to assign an effective date to process the nomination in OPS by searching through the Pending Effective Date nominations in the State column. If you click on the arrows next to State, you can group the nominations by status.
If you have multiple nominations with the same effective date, you can use the check box next to each nomination ID to select nominations. Once you have selected all the nominations which the same effective date, go to the top of the list and select Assign Effective Date.
Use the pop-up calendar to select the first Sunday of a pay period for the update to be processed. Then click on Assign Date when finished.
Send to OPS
Now you will notice the nomination status has changed from Pending Effective Date to Send to OPS. The next step you need to take to complete this action is select the nominations with an assigned effective date and send them to OPS. The nominations will be sent to OPS to create the mass update with the selected effective date. To do this, select the nominations which are ready to be sent to OPS by using the check box next to the nomination ID then click Send to OPS at the top of the list.
A text box will appear to confirm you are sending these nominations to OPS which will then send the selected nominations to the Completed list. Click Send to OPS to complete this action. Once nominations have been sent to OPS, ADG will not be able to return the nominations to a previous step.
Exclude from Send to OPS
There may be instances where you will not want to send nominations to OPS. For instance, if you have only a small number of nominations to process, it might be easier to manually process the personnel actions directly in OPS. If your Mission is accepting USDH nominations in OAS, you will notice approved nominations will come to the Send to OPS queue for processing. To move these nominations to Completed, you can use the Exclude from Send to OPS function. (Reminder: USDH nominations cannot be processed in OPS)
Select all nominations which you do not want to send to OPS for processing by using the check box next to the nomination ID. You can select nominations in either Pending Sending to OPS or Pending Effective Date. Choosing nominations which have been assigned an effective date in the Pending Sending to OPS status will remove the assigned effective date. Once you have selected all nominations you do not want to send to OPS, click on the Exclude from Send to OPS button at the top of the list.
A warning message will appear stating this action will move the nominations to the Completed list and you will need to process the actions manually in OPS. You will see the number of nominations selected. Once you are certain these are the correct nominations to exclude, click Confirm.
OPS Approval
The HRO will need to take action to approve the mass update generated in OPS to complete the action. There is no approval required or available for the FMO in OPS for the mass update. This is because the CGFS interface file has been disabled.
Award Payments
As mentioned above the award payments process is a two-step process, first sending the cash award nominations to OPS for personnel actions and second sending the awards payment cable. The awards payment cable is the same cable post HR or FMC (depending on which office manages the payment process at your post) which has always been required for payment. You will need to use the same template as usual, if you need help with this please reach out to your payroll tech for assistance obtaining a template to use for the payment cable. Once the cable is drafted you will need to attach the Finance Report generated from OAS to send to CGFS or RGFS (whichever office your Mission uses to process award payments). Please do not download the nominations for each award and send to payroll for payment. The Finance Report from OAS has been designed to contain all the information required to process the award payments. The Finance Report cannot be submitted via email, it must be submitted via official cable.
Finance Report
Anyone with an HR Admin role, Financial Analyst or Finance Officer role will have access to the Finance Report. You will need to use the filters when downloading the report and review the report for accuracy before attaching the awards payment cable.
Go to Reports Area and select Finance Report.
You will need to use the search options to filter the information you need.
A few of the most common filters used when compiling the Finance Report are Cycle, Select Date Range and Effective Date, however additional filters can be used as well. Click Search once you are finished selecting filters, this will generate a list of the criteria you selected. Then click Export to Excel to download the full report.
Cycle will search for all nominations assigned to a specific cycle.
Select Date Range will search for nominations which were submitted within a specific time period.
Effective Date will limit the nomination search to a specific effective date assigned to a nomination.
Excel Finance Report
When you open the Excel document you will notice there are more fields in this report than you see in the Finance Report in OAS, this is because the Finance Report Excel document contains the fiscal data to comply with the required format by CGFS/RGFS.
You will need to take the following actions to clean up the Finance Report before sending to CGFS/RGFS.
1. Add filters to the top row of the Excel document by highlighting the first row and then click on Sort & Filter, choose Filter.
2. Now you will see the filters at the top of each column. You can use these filters to remove information and to narrow information as needed.
3. Go to the Employee Type column and click the edit arrow to expand the filter available for this column.
4. To remove the USDH employees from this document, deselect the USDH check mark and click OK.
5. You will next need to review the award amounts to be paid. If you had any nominees in a group award who were supposed to receive a zero cash award or a different amount, you will need to make this change manually because OAS does not allow for more than one cash amount to be assigned in a group award.
6. Once you have completed your review, save the Excel Finance Report and attach it to the awards payment cable. Submit cable via SMART.
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