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
As mentioned in a previous SAP Payroll Insights newsletter, US Payroll has a new requirement to handle President Trump's memorandum on deferring Social Security payroll tax obligations. Employees earning less than $4,000 per biweekly pay period (or equivalent if paid on a different frequency) can defer their Social Security taxes between September 1 and December 31 this year. SAP released note 2963480 to support this. Essentially, enable it and then employees can elect to have their Social Security taxes deferred. Employees opt-in via a date type being set on their IT 0041, and then we have new wagetypes to store the deferred taxes. Those deferred taxes need to be collected next year, and probably reported on the W-2 I suppose. SAP is not addressing recovery via this note - maybe in a subsequent one. Many thanks to the SAP staff on a good implementation of a fairly ill-defined requirement with little lead-time. So far, I have not come across any customers who plan to offer this tax deferral to their employees - I'm curious for feedback from those who do plan to offer it.
For the very technical folks, note 2952593 contains a collection of changes being delivered for reading and defining payroll results - things like moving from macros to classes for reading results, changes in buffering and so on. If you have written your own payroll evaluation programs it would be good to review these notes and see if you need to update/enhance your code.
Note 2907385 has some good information on posting payroll to accounting in an EC Payroll environment. The links to various collections of documentation and notes are a good start to getting a good understanding of the process.
There's an error in the BSI Sync tool for US taxes that is addressed with note 2960747. And note 2962995 addresses an authorization issue for BSI in the system log.
It's time to start preparing for year-end in US payroll. SAP's note 2954621 has the usual relevant information. SAP and ASUG will have their recap of the changes on October 8 - you can register for it at ASUG's site.
IRS Mandates, or lock-in letters 2800C and 2808C, were updated to match the W-4 changes for 2020. So, Infotype 0161 had to be updated - and that is described via note 2951750.
In Brazil a couple high-priority corrections have been made for Programação de férias coletivas - note 2916115 for errors in quota simulations and 2936785 for saving data when there are errors on an employee.
Around The Web
As mentioned earlier, the social security deferral memo is getting a lot of attention in the US. Many employers are choosing not to offer it to employees for a number of reasons, as detailed in this article from the Wall Street Journal. Some Federal agencies are implementing the tax deferral for all employees. The official guidance from the IRS is pretty thin; other guidance I've seen from public accounting firms goes into more detail. Although a draft 941 form has been issued, I would still expect to see some W-2 form changes come out before year-end. SAP's note mentioned above lays a good foundation for deferring, reporting and collecting on this so customers who elect to offer this deferral are in good shape.
The American Payroll Association (APA) is hosting a virtual/online forum this year on Payroll benchmarking Trends. The September 30 session is free and will dive into the results of Deloitte's Payroll Benchmarking Survey as well as presenting the Prism Awards that showcase outstanding payroll departments. The APA also has a virtual Congress & Expo that runs through September 25.
SuccessConnect, as with most every other conference, is virtual this year. For the Americas it is October 6 and for EMEA it is October 20, and for both it is free of charge. The Mastering SAP HR & Payroll conference is also online this year. Although it is not free, this conference is one of the best at connecting people and delivering high quality content from a very customer-centric perspective.
Colorado is extending their paid-sick leave law, Seattle is imposing an employer-paid payroll tax effective Jan 1 2020. Expect to see more of this as we get closer to year-end.
And finally, here are some tips from me on How to Help Justify your EC Payroll Project. Justifying a payroll project, no matter the technology, is often difficult to do - hopefully this helps!
Quote of the Moment
“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” – Will Rodgers
Have a great day!
Steve Bogner
Managing Partner, Insight Consulting Partners
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