SAP Payroll Insights 14 January 2020

Welcome to the SAP Payroll Insights newsletter by Insight Consulting Partners! This newsletter is focused on SAP and Employee Central (EC) Payroll features, news, tips & tricks and general industry information.

Notes and Updates from SAP

Maybe for the last time - reminding US Payroll customers to be sure to follow SAP's year-end blog and their W-4 blog. And in Canada the year-end master note is 2832511. Be sure to check in on them frequently.

A side-effect in US Payroll data maintenance for Intotype 0210 is corrected via note 2875533. I think every US Payroll customer should apply this note to make sure their data maintenance for IT 210 goes smoothly.

A few US customers have asked about when the new W-4 fields will be available for placing on the pay statement. There's a note coming out for that soon - 2878349 - watch for it! Not sure if this will also address HRFORMS/Smartforms or just PE51 forms. If using HRFORMS you could always enhance the MetaNet to include the new fields. For PE51 forms, if you're impatient try just entering the new field names into table T514N for table TAX, form class CEDT and then place them on the form. It might work fine. Or wait a few days for the note.

There are some updates for US ACA reporting - notes 2873760 and 2839285. 

If your US 941 form is coming up with no amounts or empty values for box 5a-5d then see note 2878011. It's an odd note because the text talks about issues with the 941 but all the code changes are focused on the Form 940 (one digit off but completely different forms!). So if you have problems with your 940 form, maybe this fixes that too.

If you have US payroll with weekly or biweekly employees then be sure to apply note 2877988. It corrects some monthly-normalized garnishment calculations for years where there are 53 weekly periods or 27 biweekly periods. 

If you have operations in Brazil you are probably familiar with eSocial reporting by now. Note 2879172 has the planned eSocial releases for 2020. Also see note 2878329 for changes in Social Security (INSS) calculations.

If you are using multiple fixed tax rates in Australian payroll check out note 2878163 for a correction.

When you refresh your SuccessFactors instance you might get some warnings regarding payroll system configuration, data replication configuration or payroll system assignment. Note 2813109 details the steps needed to correct the values that were not refreshed properly; no word on when or if this will be fixed in the future so that customers don't have to make these manual corrections.

Users can get errors when running the Third Party Remittance Evaluation Run process, as described in note 2879865. The errors come from having regular payroll and on-demand regular payrolls processed in the same evaluation run. For example, an off-cycle regular period on-demand for period 1/2020 is run with a payment date of 29 January 2020. And before it is evaluated, a regular payroll for period 1/2020 with a payment date of 31 January 2020 is processed. When the evaluation run is done, it picks up both payrolls. Since they have different payment dates but are for the same payroll period, we get these errors. The solution is to run the off-cycle follow-up activities after every off-cycle payroll so that they do not get picked up in the regular payroll runs. In other words, implement the standard SAP Payroll process for off-cycle payrolls. 

I used to be surprised when I came across customers whose consultants didn't implement the full off-cycle payroll process, but no longer. Unfortunately, too many customers are missing out on this because their implementation consultants just didn't do it.

But on the other hand, this off-cycle follow-up process requires some additional authorizations that raise red-flags on security audits. Several customers I've worked with have security audits in place to not allow a given user ID (such as WF-BATCH) to submit jobs under a different user ID (the payroll user) - which is required for the off-cycle follow-up activities (object S_BTC_NAM/BTCUNAME). It's unfortunate that SAP designed it this way because it makes implementing the follow-up activities more difficult. It's not easy explaining to a customer that this is a requirement of the standard system; sometimes we aren't successful and the customer forgoes this feature.

Around the Web

Here's a Facebook data breach that didn't impact users, but employees: a thief stole a payroll department employee's laptop that had personal information on 29,000 Facebook employees. The file and the drive were unencrypted. As a consultant I remind myself and those working with me to not keep employee data on their laptops, and if they do need to for some reason then delete it when done. It's better to store employee data on a shared drive or service rather than on a laptop. And it seems pretty standard these days to have encrypted hard drives on laptops. The American Payroll Association also has some tips on data security.

This year is a leap-year - we have a February 29. SAP/EC Payroll generally handles this without any issues, but if you have some custom configuration regarding hours or days per month, you might want to run some tests on February payroll to make sure you don't get surprised when the time comes to process the payrolls.

Implementing SAP Payroll with Kronos as a time system can get complicated, but it's certainly not out of the ordinary. Except maybe when implementing for the New Zealand Police, where it seems to have become complex and really expensive. I've seen some really strange time and pay practices in the public sector, so I can imagine they ran into some complexities. But on the other hand, those sorts of surprises that cause projects to spiral out of control and end up with lawsuits can generally be figured out in the up-front analysis and scoping, if you are looking closely enough. If you need help with that, let me know - it's (part of) what I do. 

Aside from proper scoping, one of the most important things to do when starting a big HR/Payroll project is to get executive alignment. Sounds simple but it's one of the things I often find lacking in projects I come into. Eric Kimberling has a great blog on getting this right. I particularly like his quote on 'best practices' - "These generic approaches fuel misalignment because it gives executives and project teams a get out of jail free card. They are the misleading silver bullets that absolve the project team of making hard decisions, accepting risks and tradeoffs, and fail to address the unique needs of the organization. In other words, they are a bad idea." These 'best practices' can be decent starting points, but expectations for them have to be managed.

Quote of the Moment

'Never miss a good chance to shut up' -- Will Rogers 

Have a great day!

Steve Bogner
Managing Partner, Insight Consulting Partners

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