About BEACON: Impacted Systems: Central Payroll System (CPS)

Business Purpose:

The Central Payroll System (CPS) manages payroll activities for over 80,000 employees in over 65 state agencies and organizations, making it the largest of the payroll systems currently operating within state government. The General Assembly, UNC Hospitals, seven state universities, the Appalachian State University (ASU) power plant, the Department of Transportation, and the State Ports Authority each maintain a payroll system independent of CPS.

Capabilities:

The Central Payroll System processing is divided into three major categories: Monthly cycles, Mid-month cycles, and Cancellation and Rewrites Cycles.

• Central Payroll processes approximately 100,000 payroll transactions each month and generates 97,000 W-2s annually.
• Additional requirements include processing for refunds, moving expenses, nurses' bonuses, law enforcement allowances, education expenses, National Guard payroll, personal service contracts, student payrolls and telephone stop orders.
• The gross payroll calculation includes evaluation of employee time data that is collected by a variety of agency-specific time collection systems.
• The system also interfaces with the State general ledger accounting system (NCAS) for the posting of payroll expenditure ledger distributions as well as the reconciliation of the various payroll accounts.
• The Central Payroll System utilizes a position control number to help support the monitoring of budgeted positions and to facilitate position-based budgeting reporting.

Technical Platform:

The Central Payroll System resides on the mainframe in the OS/390 operating system with an IMS DL1 database. Originally developed in 1982 and written in the COBOL programming language, this system has been in use for over 25 years.