Customize Payroll Activity Report and/or Periodic Payroll Activity Report

Question:

What are best practices for customizing the seeded, legacy Payroll Activity Report and/or newest Periodic Payroll Activity Report? How can we add in assignment and person information to these reports?

Context:

Our payroll activity report is a custom extract that started as a copy of the seeded Payroll Activity Report. We noticed that our new, loan deduction elements do not show in our custom payroll activity report, but they do show up in the seeded Payroll Activity Report XML and in the seeded Periodic Payroll Activity Report. We realized that this is because our missing elements are included in a different balance group than our other elements. We found that a new record, LOAN_DEDUCTIONS_BAL, was added under the PRA data group in the seeded Payroll Activity Report and