Time Management Reporting Tips in SAP HR

The importance of reporting capabilities cannot be underestimated. No matter how well you have implemented your SAP system, it is only as good as the information you can get out of it. Many companies with SAP HR do not have a good handle on their time management reporting. There are often several customized reports that essentially do the same thing. Different users create ABAP queries to fill in reporting gaps. Reporting can get out of hand very quickly, but there are a couple of good, relatively easy configuration steps that can be easily implemented to shore up some reporting deficiencies within time management.

If you've been 'live' for a long period of time, work schedule rules can easily get generalized. For example, work schedule rules for complex rotating schedules or 24/7 operations are set to allow flexibility for time entry by assigning planned hours to every day regardless of the actual hours worked or scheduled for a particular week or pay period. On one hand, this simplifies the time entry and hiring/rehiring process. On the downside, SAP is not utilized for scheduling and many standard reports aren't utilized to the fullest potential.

With accurate work schedules, you can take full advantage of standard absence/attendance reports. RPTABS20 (Absence Attendance Overview) is a very flexible report that can be used for a variety of different business functions. With accurate work schedules, your company can report on utilization percentages. Planned working hours can be compared with absences to help your Human Capital department recognize true costs associated with different absence categories. On the other side of the coin, you can track employees' planned versus actual productivity without having to write customized reports.

Having accurate schedules can also help track tardiness or other problems like early clock-ins among hourly workers. The attendance check report (RPTEAB00) allows your time approvers to track discrepancies between in and out times.

Having accurate work schedule rules can also let you automate (with a little help from absence quotas) absence policies such as military leave and parental leave. This is especially helpful when these policies are married to other entitlements such as sick leave or disability programs. In order to track these hours, absences must be entered for the days an employee is out on leave. With standard infotypes such as Military Service (IT81) or Maternity Protection/Parental Leave (IT80) and just a little configuration, you can make one entry to cover an entire period of leave. This takes the burden off time entry personnel and ensures accuracy and uniformity in handling absence policies.

Given your current business situation however, creating and implementing accuracy within work schedule rules may or may not be a suitable option. Like any update to configuration you should review your current business model to determine if this strategy would work for your business. The cost of interfacing scheduling or tracking schedule changes may prove to outweigh any benefits I've listed, but it couldn't hurt to do a cost analysis.

Another easy configuration change is creating and assigning a variety of processing types to time types created from absences and attendances. You can group absences or attendances into processing types for reporting as well. By assigning all of our overtime, unscheduled, planned attendance, shift bonus and FMLA absence or attendance hours into processing types, you can easily cumulate these hours into a time type via time evaluation. These time types can be reported via the standard Cumulated Time Evaluation Results (RPTBAL00) report. This output can be used for a variety of internal reporting requirements or external hours reports for OSHA or SUI.

Obviously there are more complex reporting scenarios that your company must deal with. SAP still hasn't created a simple way to report on earnings from payroll associated with hours from time management. Those reporting needs still need to be addressed through customized reports or BW. These steps probably won't address all of your reporting needs, but hopefully they can simplify reporting out of time management.