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Do you use the US Payroll Reconciliation Report?

June 12th, 2009 by sbogner

I heard from a company the other day that they were told that they shouldn't use the Payroll Reconciliation Report for US Payroll because it wasn't accurate. They were talking about report RPCPRRU0 (RPCPRRU0_CE if you're on CE), transaction PC00_M10_REC. They said someone from SAP told them this, back in the late-90;s when they first implemented. Incredible!

If there is any one standard report in SAP US Payroll that you can trust, it's the Payroll Reconciliation Report (also known as the 'recon report'). Yes, for a long time it has run slowly. Yes, for a long time the report output was ugly and clunky (even with the new ALV layout options, it's a bit confusing). And yes, the selection options and run-time options are confusing. BUT - it is accurate for US payroll reporting. It produces results you can count on, provided you understand how to run the report and interpret the output.

How to get good at configuring and supporting SAP HR and Payroll

May 29th, 2009 by sbogner

So you want to learn how to configure SAP HR, Payroll, or Benefits? You want to be able to figure out why the system does certain things, how to troubleshoot it? I get those questions all the time from new consultants and from customers - how can I learn what you know, so I can do what you do?

Well here is the answer! Start with taking the SAP courses for HR, Payroll and Benefits configuration (along with all the prerequisites), and as you are doing that learn the basic HR, Payroll and Benefits business practrices for your country. There are books you can read and professional organzations that provide a lot of good information on how to do HR, Payroll and Benefits - buy them, join them, and learn from them. This will give you a basic foundation to build on. This is important: to be good at working with the system, you must have a good understanding of both the technical and the business processes and practices.

Parallel payroll posting functionality - RPCIPE01

May 15th, 2009 by sbogner

A couple years ago I noticed a new version of the payroll posting program - in addition to RPCIPE00 I noticed RPCIPE01 was now available. This new version of the posting program breaks the posting run into multiple parallel jobs so that the elapsed run time is shortened. That was great news because I had clients who were spending way too much time getting payroll posted into FI, CO, FM, GM, etc!

But then my enthusiasm was tempered - it didn't (yet) support Concurrent Employment payroll (which is what many of our customers use), and it didn't support PBC (Position Budget & Control) commitment creation, which was critical for a couple customers. But I've been keeping an eye on the notes that have been coming from SAP on it - note by note they have been correcting and adding functionality. It now looks like a pretty functional replacement for the standard RPCIPE00 posting program.

It's not a plug-and-play replacement though. You will have some minimal configuration to do, and if you've implemented user exits or BADi interfaces in RPCIPE00 then you will have to reimplement them for RPCIPE01. But the config and development doesn't look like all that much work - most of the work will be in testing it thoroughly to make sure you are getting correct results.

Note 1079153 introduces RPCIPE01. Since this program is likely to keep evolving for a while, be sure to search for 'RPCIPE01' in area PY-XX-DT and review all the notes there to make sure you're up to date on the current functionality.

Reviewing & auditing business process results

May 12th, 2009 by sbogner

Are you missing a critical step for improving your business processes? In my experience, most companies do leave out the critical step of reviewing and auditing the results of a business process. Without this evaluation of the results, companies miss out on all sorts of ways they could improve their processes!

I was reminded of this when reading The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad in the May 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It's a good article on how to hire managerial/executive talent. Step 7 of their 'best practice' (what a loaded term - more on that in another blog post) for hiring managers & executives is to audit and review the results. How well are those new-hires working out? For the ones who are doing well, who was involved in that process? Likewise for those new-hires who are nto working out so well. And oh by the way, if the new-hire isn't working out within a year, part ways with them instead of prolonging the damage.

Training fills the gaps - but just what is the gap?

May 9th, 2009 by sbogner
If training is supposed to fill-in the gaps of knowledge and skills we have, or to build on our existing base, it seems to me that we need to know first of all what are those gaps? What knowledge- and skills-base are people coming to the class with?
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