Oracle HCM Cloud Payroll 26A

Dec 6, 2025 ~ K8 Mead ~ 1 Comment

It’s that time again, quarterly release time, and there’s plenty to look forward to! With Oracle’s strong focus on AI, Release 26A promises some exciting updates. Oracle often adds extra features throughout the month, so keep an eye out for more enhancements as they arrive. This release is especially important for UK Payroll customers, as it includes all the new tax year functionality.

Global Payroll introduces an exciting new AI-powered tool, the Payroll Administrator Troubleshooting Agent. Known as the Payroll Run Analyst, this assistant helps payroll administrators validate employee payroll results directly from the Payroll Results page, including reviewing statements of earnings. Built on Oracle’s AI Agent framework, it delivers secure, role-based information within your permissions and significantly reduces manual effort during payroll reconciliation. It also streamlines corrective actions with deep links to related HCM pages, such as earnings and deductions, for quick updates. Best of all, it requires no extra setup and is ready to use immediately, with a chat experience coming in a future release.

Another feature worth highlighting is the redesign of payslip templates using the Redwood toolkit. The new Redwood Payslip offers a far better experience than the previous responsive version, but until now it only worked with the seeded payslip, which most organisations don’t use. With this update, the Redwood payslip can be viewed online or downloaded, and the PDF/UA templates are fully accessible while meeting all legislative requirements for payslip reporting. To stay compliant with local regulations, Oracle recommend adopting the Redwood payslip template as soon as possible.

As mentioned earlier, this release includes the UK legislative updates for the new tax year. Please note that a monthly patch may be required to incorporate any additional changes announced by the UK Government closer to April. One key update relates to the Full Payment Submission (FPS). You can now choose whether employee addresses are reported for all employees or only new starters. This option applies to the FPS processes for tax years ending April 2025 and April 2026. To set this, use the new field Employee Address on FPS from Tax Year 2024–25 on the organisation-level Statutory Deductions calculation card. By default, this is set to All Employees.

There’s also an update to the P60 template for the 2025/26 tax year. A new Statutory Neonatal Payment field has been added to the Statutory Payments section of the P60, along with a corresponding balance in the UK Balances for the End-of-Year Archive group. To generate and issue P60 End-of-Year Statements to employees, use the updated templates for 2025/26: Type LE(P), eP60 – Online and Plain Paper.

New payroll attributes have been introduced to help organisations set up adoption, maternity, and paternity absences for calculating benefit payments or offsets. Detailed steps are provided to guide you through creating the necessary elements, entitlement formula result rules, balance feeds, and validation formulas based on delivered templates. You’ll also find instructions for setting up entitlement formulas, certificates, absence plans, and absence types, ensuring a smooth and compliant process.

Oracle has now introduced Advance Pay for Irish legislation, giving employees the option to request payment before going on holiday. The amount is then recovered over a set period, such as weekly, bi-weekly, or lunar cycles, as needed. Before processing Advance Pay, make sure all other earnings and deductions have been completed. You’ll also need to configure Advance Pay usage and ensure that earnings are correctly processed during the holiday period.

Enhanced Reporting Revenue (ERR) Requests are now available, making compliance easier. After payroll runs and prepayments that include ERR element entries, use the Run Enhanced Reporting Submission Request. You can also run this process for a specific time period to report on unprocessed ERR entries, such as Travel and Subsistence, Remote Working Daily Allowance, and Small Benefit Exemption. The process generates three outputs: an ERR Audit Report showing archived employee and element details, an Errors and Warnings report, and a JSON file for Revenue submission via the Send File Submission process. For corrections, use the Run Enhanced Reporting Correction Request on previously submitted ERR files. This creates a revised JSON file, an ERC Audit Report, and an Errors and Warnings report—ready to send to Revenue.

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle usually drops extra features throughout the month, so keep an eye out! If anything really exciting comes along, I’ll post an update to make sure you’re in the loop. In the meantime, why not check out my latest blog on the new Core HR features in Release 26A? You can find it here.

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Oracle HCM Cloud Payroll 25D

Sep 7, 2025 ~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

I’m a big fan of innovation, which is why I always look forward to the Oracle Fusion Quarterly Releases. While this one doesn’t bring a huge wave of new features for Global Payroll, there are still some important updates across various legislations worth noting. In this blog, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the key highlights from both the global and local perspectives. Oracle’s got plenty more in the pipeline this quarter, so keep your eyes peeled, and if anything particularly exciting crops up, I’ll be back with another post to keep you in the loop!

The first feature in Global Payroll is the new Redwood Archive Results page. Whilst this isn’t a glamourous new feature, it is an important page. The redesigned Redwood Archive Results page offers payroll admins the modern Redwood functionality for managing their payroll data with greater efficiency and accuracy. With enhanced navigation, flexible search, customisable views, and inline editing, it’s easier than ever to identify and resolve errors, unprocessed assignments, or missing records directly within the archive. These improvements help reduce manual effort, minimise rework, and ensure smoother payslip generation and external payment processing. The feature is enabled by default via the Redwood Payroll Activity Enabled profile option, so you don’t even need to do anything and can start benefiting straight away.

All Payroll admins know that reporting is critical to the job! Oracle have made a small, but helpful update to the Payroll Costing Report. Prior to 25D, the report was a standard BI Publisher output, but listening to feedback, Oracle have rewritten the report as an extract-based one. This new version will handle larger payroll volumes and has added in more report output options, including Excel, XML and text. There are some simple steps to enable this new version of the report. First go to the Switch Task Action Version flow. Select Run Payroll Costing Report from the task list, choose the Extract-based Report version, and set it as active. From then on, all flows using this task will automatically run with the new version.

Moving on to the different legislations. There are a number of key features for Local Government in the UK. The first one is for the MCR for Teacher’s Pensions. A new input value, Error Number, is now available on the predefined TPS When Earned Details element, enabling employers to directly record error numbers linked to corrections for MCR files, particularly for When Earned U lines that typically require a TPS When Earned Details entry. This enhancement streamlines the reconciliation process for Teachers’ Pension errors. It’s easy to apply this update, navigate to Submit a Flow → Payroll, run the Run Feature Upgrade payroll flow task, and select Update Element Eligibility to Link Error Number for TPS When Earned Details Element.

There are two changes for LGPS included. Firstly a solution for the Pensionable Pay calculation for non-recurring payments. You can now easily work out the right Pensionable Pay for employees who’ve had time off mid-month and received one-off pensionable payments during their working days. With new balances in place, regular and irregular earnings are handled separately, so the LGPS employer contribution is calculated correctly without needing to prorate the monthly Pensionable Pay. Creating a new Main Pension Scheme element allows you to feed regular and irregular earnings into dedicated balances, ensuring accurate Pensionable Pay calculations for periods with one-off payments during working time. The second LGPS change relates to KIT and SPLIT days. You can now mark earnings as KIT or SPLIT days so they’re added to the right pensionable pay balances (CPP1 or CPP2). Just make sure to include the actual date worked when entering these, so the system can compare the day’s earnings with the assumed pensionable pay and use whichever is higher. If the day falls during unpaid leave, the full KIT or SPLIT earnings will be included in the pensionable pay.

With the introduction of Irish legislation for the first time, it is unsurprising that there are a significant number of new features in this release for it. These include Illness Benefit Payment or Offset; Public Sector Pensions; Salary Sacrifice; Send File Submission Process; Additional Superannuation Contribution (ASC) Forms; Check Revenue Submission Request; Payroll Submission Correction Request and Payslip Template. Additionally there are enhancements to reporting; Create Element template; Shadow Payroll; Special Assignee Relief Program and Withholding Taxes only on Irish Income. We know a few of you are already ahead of the curve when it comes to Irish legislation, so this’ll definitely be of interest. But even if you’re just starting to think about switching to Oracle Payroll, it’s still worth a look for our Irish customers.

There’s just one update this time for our US customers, but it’s worth flagging. The Retroactive Overpayment and Recovery for Earnings Elements feature is now switched on by default. Honestly, I can’t think why you wouldn’t want to use it, but just so you know, it’s no longer optional. This functionality gives you more control over how Retropay results are managed, especially when they reduce an employee’s net pay. Instead of the full overpayment being automatically deducted, you can now set up a repayment plan for the employee.

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle tend to roll out new features throughout the month. If any of these updates turn out to be game-changers, I’ll pop up a fresh blog post to keep you in the loop. In the meantime, feel free to check out my latest write-up on the new Core HR features in Release 25D, you can find it here.

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Discover Oracle HCM Cloud’s Activity Centres

Jan 25, 2025 ~ K8 Mead ~ 2 Comments

Have you seen the new Oracle HCM Cloud Activity Centres? They’re a fundamental part of the new Redwood pages and I love them! When they first came out, they were called ‘Spotlights’, but they’ve since been rebranded and now there are 4 Activity Centres.

The original Activity Centres were for Employees and Line Managers. All Activity Centres are ‘One Stop Shops’ for the relevant user. Focusing first on the Employee Activity Centre, this is where an employee can view / update their personal details; view their payslips; book annual leave and absences and many other things. If there is information that need to be shared with employees in bulk, they can be posted on there too. Any activity the employee is likely to carry out can be linked from the activity centre. If there are tasks that aren’t needed, they can be easily hidden via VBS.

In the Manager Activity Centre, Line Managers can easily access all of their team members records in one place. From here you can view employment and compensation details and also monitor talent and performance. Again important communications for line manager can be posted in here. Additionally bulk actions can be carried out for team members, such as creating communications, adding Journeys and creating surveys for feedback.

The Recruiting Activity Centre was the first one that was launched as an ‘Activity Centre’ and I regularly talk about it to my customers. It’s a great landing site for the Recruitment team to use. Originally it was only available to Recruiters and Hiring Managers, but last year it was extended to Collaborators too, so the whole team has access to this great tool. It summarises key data like high priority tasks and the number of new applicants that need reviewing. It’s easy to view the status of requisitions and offers and, my personal favourite, communication history between the Recruitment team and the candidate in conversation format. This is something that a lot of my customers have enquired about in the past.

The final, and most recent, Activity Centre is the Payroll one. It allows the Payroll team to view all payrolls in one location, easily view notifications that might indicate their has been an error or significant disparity in a payroll run and investigate the root cause. All the usual actions that the team would need to carry out are easily accessible, such as calculation cards, element entries, costing etc as well as to be able to submit payroll flows. It speeds up the time to run processes and investigate issues.

The Activity Centres are all designed to improve the user’s experience and reduce the number of menus / clicks they need to make. It has all the information that you need at your fingertips and in my personal opinion, is a massive improvement! I’m sure this won’t be the last of the Activity Centres that we see and Oracle are constantly improving the existing ones, so keep an eye out on those quarterly release updates for more news.

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