Change and Late Audit is one of the most important functionalities of Oracle Time & Labor. Change and Late Audit feature known as CLA allows system to identify the time or attribute information on Timecard which should be audited and requires to enter an explanation/comment of why a change was made to the timecard or why the entry is late. It is an optional feature and doesn't fall into the mandatory setups of OTL.

What is a CHANGE entry and what is a LATE entry? Change and late rules are not fixed entities and can be configured through the appropriate OTL preferences and Time Entry Rules. Even the list of reasons for auditing is configurable. Change and Late audit enables you to track all changes to new Timecards, as well as previously saved and submitted Timecards. These changes include modifying a saved or submitted timecard and saving timecards after a defined due date. For example, you may wish to have workers enter a reason why they changed their hours worked on Friday from 4 to 6, or why an hours type was changed to overtime from regular.

CLA feature was added to OTL to comply with the US Defense Contractor Audit Agency [DCAA]. As in a change and audit scenario, you have to track all the changes , a basic building block upon which our tracking attributes are based on can't be deleted. Hence a Timecard once created, can't be deleted. An hour entry made against a day for a particular receiving application attribute can't be deleted. So what's the solution in a scenario where audit is enabled and a Timecard has to be deleted or a wrong hour entry value has to be deleted? Only option, set the hour entries to zero.

Considering the above fact, the very first preference change for CLA setup is to disable the "Delete Timecards". This will disable the delete icon on the Recent Timecard Page.

Next preference to be modified is the "Self Service Process Flow" preference. This preference needs to be set to "Audit" from the default value of "Standard" which will add the CLA logic to the normal timecard processing flow and will prompt for Change & Late reasons if they are required to be entered as per setup.

As CLA functionality will require a new screen to show the change, late entries and prompt user to provide reason/comment, this new screen is provided through the Audit Layout. Hence Audit Layout needs to be added to "Self Service Timecard Layout" preference. This preference will already have the values for the Timecard, Review and Confirmation layouts at a minimum. When CLA is enabled for employees, you definitely would like to show those audit information to approver also. That means you also need to set the CLA Approver layout.

Now to determine which entry is late and which is a change, we need to create time entry rules. Attach these rules to a Time entry rule group and assign the rule group to a person through the preference. Existing seeded rules can be used a starting point for any custom rule development.

CLA feature was initially enabled for Self Service Time Entry only and later on was developed for Timekeeper also.