Pulpstream's HR solutions can be customized to fit your needs. The possible customizations fall into several categories:

• Personalizing Letters
• Additional Text for Letters
• Documents and Attachments
• Process Forms
• Additional Process Modifications

Personalizing Letters

As you saw when Reviewing a Leave Request, the Email Personalization option lets you modify the eligibility letter that goes out to an employee. (That option can be especially important to cushion the blow when eligibility is denied.)

 

You can also choose to Review Letters Before Sending. That option creates a review task for every letter that goes to the employee, so you can modify it or add a personal note before it goes out. 

Additional Text for Letters

As valuable as personalization is, there are some things that need to be added to all outgoing letters. Pulpstream's HR solutions provide a number of Mail Merge variables for that purpose.

 

To get to them, from the Main Gear icon choose Account Management. Then, under the Company Info tab, go to the Mail Merge tab. That tab contains a column of mail-merge variables in the left-side column, with their corresponding values in the right-side column. The text defined for those variables is inserted into the letters that are sent out. 

 

The text-segment variables you need to know about are:

• Text in Letters for Approved Leave 
• Text in Letters for Preliminarily Approved Leave
• Health Benefits Text
• FMLS Military Text 
• Company Text in Letters (added to the end of every letter) 

In general, Company Text will be last in a letter, with the other text segments just above it. To edit them, you'll need the appropriate privileges. (Contact your administrator.) Then use the instructions below to make changes, paying particular attention to the CAUTIONary note.

• Text in Letters for Approved Leaves - What you want to say in a leave that has been fully approved. This variable contains default text that can be customized. It has a few control elements, but not to many. (Just be careful not to disturb them when editing. See the notes below.)
    
• Text in Letters for Preliminarily Approved Leaves - What do you want to say in a leave that has preliminary approval. Like the Approved Text variable, this variable starts with default text that can customized. (See the notes below)
   
  
• Health Benefits Text - This text will be included in all approval/preliminary approval letters.
   
• FMLA Military Text - Text that goes into letters regarding military leave.
   
• Company Text in Letters - Anything you want to add to the end of any letter your organization sends. (For example, maybe the organization has a tag line it wants to include in every communication. Put it here.)

CAUTION: Avoid changing these:

• Variables - Text like $!Leave.Leave_Granted identifies a variable in the Pulpstream platform. 
  
• Conditional code with variables - Text like this is a conditional expression that tests Pulpstream variables and chooses what to do based on their values:
  #if ($!Leave.Leave_Reason_value=='TM Illness or Injury' || $!Leave.Leave_Reason_value=='Pregnancy Disability Leave') 

In general, avoid change any sequence of text that starts with "$!" or #, and you'll be fine. (But to be sure, create a test record as explained in FAQ #20 and verify that what you get is what you expected.)

Test Your Changes

After changing a variable, click the green check-mark at the end of the line to make sure the variable substitutions work. You will be promoted to choose a test record. When you do, you'll see see how the message looks with the substitutions in place.

Documents and Attachments

 

To make a change, you first select what you want to modify (letter or document, for example), and then choose the organizational group the change applies to. (Groups are defined by organization. A change made to the Headquarters group applies everywhere, while a change made to group that reflects a geographic region New York would apply only to employees who belong to that group.)

 

Note:
Groups can be defined using any criteria your organization needs. Geography is just an example. Learn more: Groups

 

From the Home page, open the Organization menu and select what you want to modify:

• Documents & Additional Attachments - You substitute your own documents and letters to replace the default versions that Pulpstream provides (not including government-mandated documents). You can also add additional files to the list of attachments that are automatically included with any given letter or document, or do both (replace and add files) at the same time.
  
  In general, you'll use choice to add to the list of attachments that routinely accompany a message. 
  (It is also possible to create a replacement document, but that is not a task for the faint of heart! Behind the scenes, Pulpstream generates those documents, using a myriad of "Mail Merge" variables and conditional text.
  
  At a minimum, your organization's logo and company name are substituted, along with other information specific to your organization. In general then, replacing a document requires a copy of the original template that is carefully edited so as not disturb any of the programming controls that make it work.
  
  Mostly, though, all you really need is to add some additional text to the form letters your organization sends. To do that, see FAQ #22: Add text to an employee's eligibility letter.
   
  
• Custom Email Templates - Change the subject line and body of an email, and add additional attachments. 
    
  
• Adhoc Documents - Create a list of documents the HR Team can manually include as attachments when processing a Leave request. (Each list of documents is given a name. When the HR rep chooses a name from the list of Adhoc documents, all of the files in that list are included as attachments.)

Process Forms

Pulpstream HR solutions are built around processes. The benefits of that approach are described in Process Automation (and why it matters). But while the Leave of Absence (LoA) process may differ from one organization to the next, similar organizations tend to use similar processes.

 

For example, the LoA process for hourly employees may require additional information, compared to salaried employees.  In the Pulpstream HR LoA solution, that difference becomes a change to the Leave Request form that can easily be turned on or off.

 

To make that change, go to Main Gear Icon > Account Management > Company Info > Mail Merge

There, you see a list of variables. On the left are the Titles of those variables. On the right are their Values.

 

As you saw earlier, those values are generally inserted into a document or email, replacing variables that act as placeholders in the document/email templates. That process is known as merging, so the title of the tab is Mail Merge.

 

But that page does define variables, and variables have other uses. In particular, variables can be used to control processes, as well supply data for them. Here, the variable titled Employee Schedule in Request Form has the value "Yes" or "No". It's value determines whether or not the number of hours worked for each day of the week appears at the end of the Leave Request form (as described in Filling Out the LoA Request Form).

Additional Process Modifications

In addition to the foregoing customization options, it is also possible to modify process stream in other ways:

• Custom Tasks - The process stream can be modified to create additional tasks for people or groups you designate.
   
• Additional Reminders - In addition to the reminders Pulpstream automatically generates for Leave of Absence tasks and for the employees taking, the stream can be modified to generate additional reminders.
   
• Federal Forms - Some organizations choose to use only federal forms, rather than including state forms.

These changes require modifying the process stream itself, so they can only be performed by qualified personnel. For more information, contact your Pulpstream representative.​