InsightCP Newsletter - Issue 47

Insight is an SAP HR consulting firm that works with companies to streamline and optimize their SAP HR systems and associated work processes.

According to a Hudson survey, most workers are satisfied with their work-life balance. Even though 39% work more than forty hours per week, 76% are satisfied or very satisfied with their work-life balance. And 70% say they actually have fun at work! They do find that corporate employees are less likely to be satisfied with their work than their governmental and entrepreneurial counterparts.

CFO.com reports that there may be changes in store for defined-benefit pension plans. The pending legislation is intended to get plans back towards being fully-funded, but critics say it could cause companies to freeze their plans instead. It's estimated that such plans are currently underfunded by $354 billion.

Hewitt Associates' recent survey shows base pay increases will remain flat for 2006, with employers planning roughly 3.5% in increases. Increases in variable pay are expected to grow to 11.1% in 2006, from 11.4% in 2005 and 9.5% in 2004. Given the low pay increases, 42% of companies are reporting problems in attracting and retaining key talent.

SAP has started using note 550806 to maintain the official BSI tax code mapping. Whenever a new tax authority is added to BSI, SAP will list it here along with the corresponding SAP tax authority.

On releases 4.6C and above, the beloved US Payroll Reconciliation Report has an error when run in the FI-W2 view. It may report a few lines that do not actually exist in the payroll results. Note 850091 describes this in more detail and offers a solution.

There can be cases when the third-party remittance update program RPURMU00 creates duplicate entries. See note 869379 for more information on when this might happen and how to resolve it.

In SAP HR releases 4.7 and higher, it may happen that wagetype /5PY is created in the RT with a value of zero. Note 867896 has been issued to correct this.

When you enter several substitutions on one day, there may be an error in the daily work schedule when running Time Evaluation. OSS note 706805 corrects this.

Have an SAP HR question? Email it to us at info@insightcp.com and we'll answer selected questions in the next newsletter!

Are BDC's going away in mySAP ECC 5.0?

There are some screen controls in 5.0 that are not compatible with BDC's, but they are not very common at all in HR. We know of customers on 5.0 still using BDC's in HR.

We would like to track stock options in SAP - the exercise price, when they were exercised, etc.. A non-SAP website said that SAP was going to have new functionality to track this in mySAP. Is this the case?

SAP has infotype 379 for stock purchase plans, but it's not meant for stock options. In the Compensation Management module there is a section for Long Term Incentives that has some functionality that could be configured for basic stock option management. But in our experience, stock options get complicated even in 'simple' cases. While a company could build their own stock-option 'bolt-on' to SAP, most will outsource the stock option management to a broker and then just interface the exercises back into SAP for payroll purposes.

Could you give an overview of Time Manager's Workplace, or a link to more information?

Time Manager's Workplace is a transaction that is designed to help Time Administrators manage the data for their employees. It pulls together all the common reporting, data entry and data correction activities into one place. Here's a link: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_erp2004/helpdata/en/3a/ec0fc8dd7811d396fb00a0c930669b/frameset.htm

Copyright 2005 Insight Consulting Partners