Close
Enter your
text here

employee central payroll implementation

Overview SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll
SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll
 SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll 1024 682 SpinifexIT

In this introduction to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, learn about the cloud-based payroll system meant to handle global enterprise needs.

If you’re a payroll manager, finance professional or HR executive who is looking for a new payroll system, there are many choices in the market. One to consider is SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll.

What is SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll?

SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll is a cloud-based payroll system meant to provide the breadth of functionality and global coverage enterprises need.

The core Employee Central Payroll system is built using the SAP Payroll engine, providing a reliable and proven engine for calculating the most complex of payrolls.

The Payroll Control Center front end brings pre-payroll and post-payroll processes, continuous data auditing, and payroll processing reporting and analytics to payroll administrators in a one-stop shop. At the time of writing, Employee Central Payroll supports 46 countries for payroll processing and localization support.

The Employee Central system is a prerequisite for implementing and using the Payroll system. So, this is a factor to consider if you are looking purely for a payroll system without changing your existing core HR system.

From a high level, Employee Central Payroll provides a number of important functions. It can run end-to-end, gross-to-net payroll, covering tax calculations, such as through partner product BSI TaxFactory in the U.S. It can print checks, remit payments, provide online employee pay slips and post payroll results to your financial system.

From a compliance and security perspective, Employee Central Payroll brings standard-delivered data formats, such as address, telephone, email, national ID and name. It provides fields for contracts and, in supported countries, the functionality to support local laws and reporting or other communication with local authorities. Examples of this include superannuation in Australia, e-filing of employees’ payments and deductions in the United Kingdom, and storing and reporting salary increase changes in Brazil.

Employee Central provides a way to manage and automate master data privacy and retention policies that uphold compliance with regional, federal, and local rules regarding data privacy.

It also includes Event Listener for Pre-Payroll Monitoring, which scans HR master data to identify any data changes. These are cross-checked against any open alerts by the system, and if any of the changes resolve an open alert, then the alert will be closed. This enables more streamlined payroll data monitoring and frees up time to focus elsewhere.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll use cases

Vendors such as SAP, ADP and Ultimate Software are popular choices for payroll and provide a lot of functionality for running payroll in the United States, Canada and other countries. However, with many choices out there, it can be difficult to determine what system is best for your company.

Price might be a factor, but when it comes to payroll, it is often better to look at what features, functionality and compliance capabilities each payroll vendor provides. You may find yourself reviewing seven or eight different vendors before producing a shortlist. Sometimes, it is necessary to issue a request for information to identify which vendors to invite to a formal request for proposal process.

Employee Central Payroll is ideal for customers who are either global, complex or both. Typically, the base number for getting ROI on the implementation is about 1,000 employees in a country. In some cases, customers with fewer employees can get good ROI.

If your workforce has one or more unions — whether you have any collective bargaining agreements or not — then Employee Central Payroll would be a suitable option. It has an ability to handle the complexity of having specific rules and regulations defined by unions that are in addition to federal, state, local and regional laws.

If you have — or plan to have — all of your employees in Employee Central, Employee Central Payroll can serve as a global payroll option. The point-to-point integration between the two ensures that employee data from all countries can flow between the systems and can be monitored using the provided monitoring tools. No middleware integration is needed for Employee Central Payroll to use the master data in Employee Central for payroll processing.

If you want to fully outsource your payroll processing, you may wish to look at vendors that specialize in those particular services. However, some service providers do offer outsourced payroll processing for customers using Employee Central Payroll.

Reimplement your support and maintenance

SAP provides standard technical support for live systems through its SAP ONE Support Launchpad. The latest support packages — a collection of the latest legal requirements and corrections — are applied by raising a ticket through SAP ONE Support Launchpad. SAP also offers some premium support services for customers.

For payroll maintenance, applying patches and fixes, or business process outsourcing services, you can reach out to a variety of payroll service providers and systems integrators for support, depending on what you are looking for.

For ongoing government compliance, SAP has a team of more than 150 people that track and manage local compliance laws and regulations across numerous countries. SAP provides local legal changes for Employee Central Payroll for all supported countries. These legal changes can include such changes as new reporting requirements, tax rate changes and sick pay changes. These are provided as support packages, but you can also have an administrator apply them in Upgrade Center.

New features and functionality — as well as legal changes — are released every six months, usually in the second or fourth quarter. Urgent bug fixes are typically released on a weekly or biweekly basis. New features and legal changes can be applied using Upgrade Center in the system.

Reporting and analytics

Two of Employee Central Payroll’s weaker capabilities are its reporting and analytics. Reporting is limited to just payroll data — for example, worker, compensation and tax data — and cannot combine data from other systems, such as organizational objects or cost allocation objects. Based on your needs, you may need to augment functionality with a third-party product, like SpinifexIT.

Licensing

Employee Central Payroll uses a SaaS subscription model and is charged annually on a per-employee, per-year basis. For exact pricing, you should reach out to your local account executive at SAP.

Enterprise payroll capabilities

Employee Central Payroll is capable of handling significant complexity and provides a broad range of payroll functionality.

Here’s a list of some of that functionality:

  • Gross-to-net payroll;
  • Legal changes and localization, including country-specific reporting;
  • Tax forms, tax models and tax compliance at a country and local level;
  • Advances and deductions;
  • Retroactive calculations;
  • Payroll simulations;
  • Check printing;
  • Alerts for data errors or inconsistencies;
  • Data privacy and protection;
  • Payroll auditing;
  • Integration with finance systems for general ledger posting, time and attendance systems, pension providers and benefits providers;
  • Evaluation of time data for generating compensation data;
  • Unions and collective bargaining agreements;
  • Garnishments;
  • Analytics and KPIs;
  • Employee self-service; and
  • Mobile access through the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile application.

The Employee Central core HR system is a prerequisite of implementing Employee Central Payroll, and the two are tightly integrated.

Author

iXerv-President-Luke-Marson

Luke Marson

President, Americas
iXerv

This article is a repost from Tech Target.
Read it here.

Take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level (Part 2)
 Take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level (Part 2) 1024 576 SpinifexIT

In this blog, we’ll step back to consider some of the challenges during implementation, both for existing on-premise customers deciding to migrate to Employee Central Payroll (ECP) and for new Customers planning to implement ECP.  

This blog will focus on Payroll Migration, but of course, you still need to implement Employee Central.

If you already have Employee Central implemented and connected to your on-premise solution, then the migration process could be much simpler as you may be able to just focus on the ECP side and know that the Employee Central configuration and setup is already there.

 

Moving from On-Premise? Implement, Reimplement or Migrate your Payroll

Many companies who are looking to move to Employee Central Payroll will be existing SAP On-Premise customers. If you fall into this category, you need to consider how much of your existing Payroll configuration and setup you would want to move to the Employee Central Payroll Solution.

SpinifexIT_April 2020 blog_Taking your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level part 2_Cost vs risk

Migrate your System

The intent of the migration is to move your configuration, and historical employee data (including payroll history) to the new Employee Central Payroll solution with the aim that it will run with minimal changes. This means less re-configuration, less testing and that you can continue to use your new system to report historical data.

Reimplement your Payroll

In some cases, customers may have areas that they have felt have always been a challenge. For example: There may be an old configuration you wish to remove, or you want to reconfigure some payroll rules to operate differently. 

This is often a perfect time to do this as you have a project team and can incorporate this work into the existing project. It is also lower risk as you are only changing some areas of the configuration.

Save yourself and your company hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars!

The best course of action is to begin planning now, so you can review all the options available to you. Part of this is learning the prerequisites you’ll need to support your project more efficiently.

Aside from the migration of the payroll configuration, there are many other areas to also consider. 

Some of these include:

– Will I migrate my prior history for the employees? For example: Do you move your payroll results, employee history, finance postings, year to date results into the new system?
– How do I best perform Parallel runs?
– Do I migrate my existing ABAP reports and other functionality into the new system?
– For any reports being migrated, how will I modify and maintain these into the future?
– Can all of my reports (Either custom reports or standard SAP reports) be executed from Employee Central, or by the Managers themselves?
– How will I cater for my Adhoc Requests that come up. Often we see customers go from 20-30 go live reports to hundreds in a period of 12 months. If you have adhoc requests, you want to know how you will cater for these?
– Will all your custom reports and manual reports be able to fit into the Payroll Control Center process?
– If I need additional Payroll Control Center checks, how can I add these?

Author

SpinifexIT Darren Souter

Darren Souter

SpinifexIT Founder & Global Architect

 

 

 
SpinifexIT April blog_Take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level part 2 checklist image

If you need help assessing these questions further, feel free to talk to us, or even comment down below. We can schedule a quick discussion or even refer you to some of our customers who have used our solutions for their own implementations.

Ready to move to Employee Central Payroll?

The Easy Migration solution will help you de-risk and accelerate your migration to ECP with an integrated toolset that allows full configuration and data migration copies from On-Premise to ECP, reports to validate full payroll results, runs repeated payroll tests, and identifies data and configuration inconsistencies between source and target systems for corrections. 

SpinifexIT_April 2020 blog_Taking your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level part 2_Easy Migration

Easy Migration

Our Easy Migration solution helps you complete your ECP migration process 90% faster than traditional implementation times. It can help you:

  • Identify and migrate your current payroll configuration to Employee Central Payroll.
  • Copy current employee data and results into the new system, and
  • Run reconciliation reports fast using built-in reports, powered by our SAP-Certified reporting solution

Our Easy Migration solution is also 100% integrated with other SpinifexIT solutions so it is an easy step to transition to our other products if you have the need.

 

What if I have already implemented ECP or plan to remain on-premise for the moment?

If you have already moved to Employee Central Payroll, or are happy to just stay with your on-premise solution for the moment, this doesn’t mean that you cannot look to areas to improve.

About 90% or more of the customers who we speak to, already have Employee Central Payroll or SAP Payroll installed and running, and are looking to improve some of their day-to-day manual processes.

In this case, the SpinifexIT solutions can just be installed into your existing system.  The way that most customers then start to use the solutions is as follows:

  • Train on how to use the solutions – This is about 3-5 days training upfront
  • Identify the time-consuming processes that your team is doing, and then replace these with any of our 120 pre-delivered reports. You can also build custom reports to support your HR and Payroll information requirements. This immediately removes a lot of manual steps and starts to free up your team. Here is the YouTube case study.
  • New, ad hoc requests can be delivered through Easy Reporter. Reports can be scheduled and emailed out directly to the required person so it completely removes the need for manual processing.
  • If your payroll has Year End processes for Australia, USA or Canada, start to use our predefined Year End solutions.
  • From here, you can continue to replace your existing manual processes with the automated Easy Reporter steps.

Over a quick period, you will be able to automate the extraction, generation, and sending of your reports. Instead of spending a lot of time and effort manually building the perfect set of reports, your team can then focus on delivering a high-quality service to your customers.

In Summary

Employee Central Payroll is a powerful solution, but like most software solutions, will have areas that can be further streamlined. Whether this is during the implementation, streamlining payroll processes, report building, or reconciliation steps, there are always many ways to further take advantage of your ECP solution.

If you decide to walk the SpinifexIT path, you will find that we are not just a software solution that is dropped into your system and rarely used. 

Our team of expert consultants will work directly with your team right through the implementation and into go live to ensure you use the best practice methods from the start and build long-lasting processes, based on the best practices we have seen at hundreds of other customers.

The reporting and Payroll Control Center solution (discussed in Part 1) is just part of the SpinifexIT solution set, but if you are moving to Employee Central Payroll, this is a key building block for your journey. 

Along the way, you may have a need for our other solutions, and the good thing is that most of our solutions leverage off of Easy Reporter, so you are starting with the best-of-breed solution.

SpinifexIT solutions can be installed in a matter of hours into your system, but if you are using any of our partner’s hosted Employee Central Payroll or SAP Payroll Solutions, then our solutions are already available in their environments. Make sure to ask them about us!

As always, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] for any questions.

On a side note, we hope you’re doing well, and that you and your loved ones are healthy, safe and well despite what the world is going through. We’re all in this together, and SpinifexIT will always be here to support you if you need help with our solutions. 

 
 
 
 

Stay connected!

Our North American team recently held a User Group Meeting for all SpinifexIT customers. Stay tuned for announcements, so you may join these online activities in the future!

Subscribe
Employee Central Payroll
Take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level
 Take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level 1024 475 SpinifexIT

In this blog, we’ll provide insights on options you can take to save time and thousands of dollars in your payroll business. This includes our findings whilst speaking with our own customers when streamlining their Payroll process. 

It is always a challenge for a customer new to SAP Payroll to know some of the challenges they will encounter along the journey, so I am trying to highlight some of the areas that I know will come up during implementation and post go-live.

For 20 years, I’ve been working in and around the SAP payroll solution and have been building software that can streamline its processes from end to end.

Whilst overall, I would think that most customers would benefit from additional solutions to streamline the existing processes, I will provide a balanced viewpoint without necessarily talking about just software solutions.

Author

SpinifexIT Darren Souter

Darren Souter

SpinifexIT Co-Founder & Product Chief Technology Officer – Easy Suite

 

 

The SAP Customer’s Standard Journey

 

Now, let’s talk about the journey of a standard SAP customer.

 

SAP Customer Journey

 

SAP Customer Journey

 

Reporting takes backstage during the implementation process, but turns out to be a major requirement as time goes on. So, does this mean needing additional reporting solutions?

 

 

Let’s explore the standard reporting solutions and find out if it is enough to work with these.

 

 

Standard Employee Central Payroll Reports

Employee Central Payroll will come standard with many reports such as Superannuation Reports, Wagetype Reporter and Various Other pre-defined reports.

These are all useful reports, but they are generally hardcoded and cannot easily be altered.

Adhoc Query is a generic reporting tool that SAP provides, however this only reports specific data such as infotypes and does not combine this with Payroll or other Transactional Results.

❯ This is often the starting place for reporting and we would recommend you understand the reports that are delivered out of the box.

 

People Analytics

This is a new Employee Central Reporting solution that sits on top of SAP Analytics Cloud. This is for reporting SuccessFactors data and replaces a number of the existing SuccessFactors reporting solutions.

At this time, this solution does not include Payroll Reporting.

❯ People Analytics is a new solution and as of today, it is too early to indicate the overall value proposition.

 

Workforce Analytics or People Analytics – Advanced Edition

Workforce Analytics (Now known as People Analytics Advanced Edition) is a useful Management Analytic Solution, but is often more higher business level reporting.

Whilst this delivers a subset of Payroll Reports, these are often not the day to day reports the payroll team will require, but focused more on Management type reporting.

❯ This solution is not generally used for day-to-day Payroll Reporting.

 

SAP Analytics Cloud

This solution allows you to build your own dashboards and user stories using data from various systems with powerful visualisation tools.

It would be possible to build your payroll reporting, but you need to consider how to get the data into this solution, and then how to cater for things like security, regular updates etc.

❯ This requires reports to be purpose built and then updated with data.  Much like many Business Warehouse solutions, and Workforce Analytics, this is more of a management analytics solution.

 

ABAP Custom Reports

Within the Employee Central Payroll Solution, the Internal IT Team can build their own reports. These however require a specific skill set and often end up with fairly purpose built reports.

❯ This is not a cost effective approach for most reporting needs.

 

Excel Reports

Most customers resort to using Excel or some other tool to extract data from Employee Central Payroll. You can include multiple data sources and merge them together to produce the reports you need.

❯ This is a very manual process and often results in many complex spreadsheets that require an expert to maintain.

 

So many reports, so little time

 

Equipping your payroll team with the right tools and expertise upfront saves you a lot of time and many thousands, in some cases, millions of dollars.

 

Here’s where SpinifexIT can help you.

 

Employee Central Payroll

 

 

Our customers have found that SpinifexIT is not just “nice to have”, but a mandatory solution for their day-to-day work. Our accelerator is powered by our SAP-certified Easy Reporter solution, our Payroll Control Center (PCC) Accelerator add-on, and a couple of localized solutions for Australian (Easy STP) and North American (Easy Balance) payroll reconciliation, and more!

 

 

PCC Accelerator

Implement your PCC without any additional code creation

Run reconciliation reports using Easy Reporter’s pre-delivered content and your custom content

Easy Reporter

Easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface so you can make your own report versions

Building reports from scratch takes minutes, not days!

Automate and pre-schedule report generation and distribution

Localized Reports

Take advantage of bundled solutions for reconciling your Australian STP process or your North American year-end Payroll activities

 

 

  • Purpose build Payroll Day to Day and Compliance Reports that can be run out of the box
  • Adhoc report capabilities to build the reports you need in minutes
  • Distribution Capabilities that can be used for sending reports out to managers, departments or even external interfaces such as Deduction Vendors
  • Full Integration into the Payroll Control Center solution as well as Employee or Manager
  • Self Service Capabilities for any report you want to make available
  • Additional Functionality delivered out of the box that can be used to streamline implementation of Employee Central Payroll and even Testing the Regular upgrades.

 

In part 2 of this blog, we’ll be featuring customer case studies where SpinifexIT solutions have been implemented and how clients have considered it a success. We’re also including a checklist you can refer to whilst planning your implementation.

 

 

Let’s continue the conversation!

Subscribe to SpinifexIT to know the latest about our solutions!

Email us at [email protected]
to book a quick 15 – 30 minute discovery call to learn more about how you can take your Employee Central Payroll system to the next level.

Subscribe