What Are Discretionary Groups?

Discretionary groups are a tool in the Salary Planner Assistant (SPA) application that make it easy to mark university employees whose salaries are handled by entities outside of their department. An employee placed into a discretionary group will be taken out of their department's salary pool for the associated planning period, and their salary must then be handled manually. They will not be included in any reports or salary letters for their department.

For example, if an employee in the English department is assigned the "For Dean" discretionary group, they will be taken out of the English department's salary pool, and their new discretionary group will make it clear that their salary must be handled by the dean of the college.

How to Add A New Discretionary Group

Step 1 - From the Salary Group Admin Home of the Salary Planner Assistant application, look for the button labeled Discretionary Groups near the top of the page, and click it.

Step 2 - On the Discretionary Groups page, click the green + Add Discretionary Group button.

Step 3 - In the window that pops up, assign your new discretionary group a name and an easily-identifiable code. Once you are finished, click Save.

Your newly-created group will be displayed in the list of discretionary groups, and will be ready for use!

How to Assign Employees to a Discretionary Group

Step 1 - From the Salary Group Admin Home page, select the View Period button next to the desired planning period.

Step 2 - Once on the page for your selected planning period, locate the department whose employee you wish to assign, and enter the department's salary plan by clicking either the View button, or the name of the department.

Step 3 - Find the employee in question within the salary plan, and click on the dropdown next to their name under the Discretionary Group column.

Then, select the discretionary group to which you'd like to add the employee from the dropdown menu.

Step 4 - When you are ready, click the green Save button in the bottom-left corner of the page.

The assigned employee will disappear from their original salary group, and will instead appear on the page under the chosen discretionary group (in this example, "For Dean"). A message under the discretionary group's name will confirm that the employee will not be included in any department salary totals, reports, or letters.

For more tutorials on Salary Planner Assistant, visit ATLAS Salary Planner Assistant - Homepage.