PBJ Export

Overview

This is the documentation for the new PBJ report. As this is a new report with a voluntary submission period, we are still working on some details on the best way to collect the information required using as much current information in the software as possible.

The Payroll Based Journal is a system for facilities to submit staffing and census information to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS intends to collect staffing and census data through the PBJ system on a voluntary basis beginning on October 1, 2015, and on a mandatory basis beginning on July 1, 2016.

The software will create the ZIP files required by CMS, with each ZIP file containing a single XML file. CMS requires categorization of the employees and their time data within the XML file. The data is organized into 4 sections; header, employees, hours and census.

Header

The header contains information identifying the file version specification being used, information to identify the facility and the date range of the data within the file. It also contains information about SBV including a contact email address and the software version used to create the file.

Required: You need to enter your facility identifier and state into the software. This will be done at the Configuration level for a single facility, or at the Facility level for a multi-facility software.

Employees

The employees section will use the employee ID, hire and termination information currently in the software. CMS also requires a Pay Type Code which is used to distinguish Exempt, Non-Exempt and Contract staff. Our initial implementation is using the In House flag on the Company labor level to distinguish Contract and Staff, with all Staff currently being identified as Non-Exempt.

To be determined: a mechanism for identifying the exempt staff. Typically this is something that a pay rule or base schedule would indicate so adding an Exempt field to either the pay rule or the base schedule group may be the easiest way to identify the exempt staff.

Note: hire dates are required for all staff. For contract staff, this will be the first day worked. When creating the file and a payroll employee does not have a hire date, we will need to provide an error log for review. There is also an additional requirement that an employee that has had a termination date submitted can only be submitted without a termination date of the hire date is after the previously submitted termination date. We do maintain status history so deleting an inactive statsu record to re-activate an employee could be problematic.

Required: the department configuration now has a PBJ Work Type Code dropdown from which you must categorize each department.

To be determined: the best mechanism for filtering out unworked hours. Currently we provide a pay type selection in the Options tab. Another issue is owed worked hours and referencing the actual date and not the pay date.

Note: an additional field named Work Type Code was used to determine Full Time from Part Time employees but this field has been eliminated in the first revision of the specifications. We are identifying all employees as Full Time as a workaround.

Hours

The employee's paid hours (not worked hours) are to be submitted.