After some additional testing, the Entitlement Balances functionality is working fine. One of our testers discovered note 473272.1 on Metalink which appeared to be similar to our problem. The issue was resolved by extending our payroll calendar out by another two years. Oracle has logged Bug 5743838 in which part of this issue is described.
The screen shot below show a successful calculation in June 2010 after the extension of the payroll calendar.
Release 12.1 includes a useful addition to Absence Management. Employees and Managers can now use Self Service to calculate leave accruals based on an effective date. The new tab in the Absence Management function, named "Entitlement Balances", is shown below.
A user simply inputs the desired date and hits the "Go" button. The accrual is calculated as of the date entered. This is useful for both employees and managers wishing to view accrual balances on a given date.
This new functionality appears to work well within the current plan year. Curious to see what would happen if I entered a date in the next year, I tried 01-Jan-2010. I immediately received an error indicating a problem with a user defined function in the accrual formula "PTO_PAYROLL_CALCULATION". We'll have to take a closer look at this to see what is happening. I would fully expect someone to try a date far into the future, so we'll need a more graceful ending than a framework error page.
Even with that small issue, the new Entitlement Balances functionality looks like a useful addition to both Employee and Manager Self Service.
