The configuration steps used to enable payroll posting to Financials (FI) can be a bit confusing. The related help screens do a good job of explaining how to set up the process for an initial implementation, but they do not provide guidance for implementing changes to an already live FI posting process. I will examine the relationship between existing configuration, existing posting documents, revised configuration, and future posting documents. I’ll illustrate several typical FI posting changes and reveal the interaction between wage types, employee subgroup groupings, and symbolic accounts. I’ll also clarify the implications for existing and future posting documents.

Symbolic accounts are a way to bring together financial amounts from different sources that are all bound for the same General Ledger (G/L) account or accounts. Posting documents transfer liabilities and expenses from HR to FI. Symbolic accounts map wage types on the HR side to G/L account numbers on the FI side. For a detailed explanation of the money flow from HR to FI, see the sidebar, “How Symbolic Accounts Work.”

Symbolic accounts consist of a four-character code and a description. In most parts of SAP, I discourage using mnemonic codes because users rarely see the codes. However, I feel that mnemonic codes are helpful for symbolic accounts because the system rarely shows the symbolic account’s description. Neither the IMG steps where you assign symbolic accounts to G/L accounts in Figure 1 nor the FI posting log display the description. Naming the codes appropriately can help you diagnose problems and prevent errors.

Figure 1

Assign symbolic accounts to G/L accounts

I prefer to name symbolic accounts for expenses starting with an E and those for liabilities starting with an L. This makes it easy to distinguish expenses from liabilities in a list of symbolic accounts. The remaining three characters can represent the type of transaction, with names such as SAL for salary and SUI for state unemployment tax.

Symbolic accounts can use the employee subgroup grouping (ESG) feature, but it is not required. Examine the posting requirements that your accounting department provides and only activate the ESG feature on symbolic accounts that require it. This prevents unnecessary table T030 entries and eases ongoing maintenance. Accounts such as salary expense are often divided by employee type, while accounts such as unemployment insurance normally are not.

Symbolic account definitions are not date delimited. This means that you cannot delimit a symbolic account as a means of removing it from your configuration. You may want to delete a symbolic account that is no longer in use, but this can lead to problems.

Your system continues to assign the obsolete symbolic account to one or more wage types in the past. If you need to retroactively adjust your records to an old wage type, a posting document failure occurs because the required symbolic account is missing. Allow obsolete accounts to remain in your configuration. You can modify the text description to record the account’s status — a note such as “del 2/2006” could prevent others from using the account. For an example of this scenario, refer to Mohamed Khalid Yousif’s article “Why Symbolic Accounts Are the Key to a Smooth Payroll Posting Process” in the August/September 2005 issue of HR Expert.

For more ways to protect the integrity of your system, refer to the sidebar “6 Cardinal Rules for Changing FI Posting Configuration” below.

Map Wage Types to Symbolic Accounts

The first step of creating a posting document is to group similar wage types together into symbolic accounts. The IMG step for this configuration includes begin and end dates, so you can delimit and change this assignment over time. Each year, your accounting department may decide to change the G/L accounts that receive certain financial amounts. The date-delimited aspect of the wage type mapping view allows you to point wage types to different symbolic accounts in different time periods.

Here’s an example from company X, which has contracted with a vendor to provide uniform cleaning service. In financial year 2005, the uniform deduction wage type posted to liability account 216344. Starting on 1/1/2006, accounting decided to post uniform deductions to expense account 510078. When you examine the IMG steps for posting to accounting, you find that wage type 7302 maps to symbolic account LUNF and symbolic account LUNF is assigned to G/L account 216344.

It may seem that the correct way to adjust this is to replace account 216344 with 510078 in the Assign financial accounts IMG step. This change would leave the impression that wage type 7302 has always posted to account 510078, although existing posting documents assign these deductions to account 216344.

A better solution is to create a new symbolic account like EUNF. In the step to assign wage type posting attributes, you can delimit wage type 7302 on 1/1/2006, following the menu path shown in Figure 2 in the sidebar, “How Symbolic Accounts Work.”

Assign the new symbolic account starting on 1/1/2006 and leave the old symbolic account assigned for the time period ending on 12/31/2005. This ensures that any retroactive accounting that happens in 2006 for 2005 uses the 2005 posting rules. The wage type posting is delimited so any payroll evaluated in the period up to 12/31/05 uses the old symbolic account and those dated 1/1/06 or later use the new one. This strategy also allows you to configure, test, and implement the 2006 posting rules before the end of 2005 without affecting the remaining 2005 posting runs.

Change ESG Groupings

The feature PPMOD assigns ESG groupings. This enables you to easily implement the common accounting practice of using separate accounts for similar payments that different types of employees receive. Company X does this with vacation pay expense. Account 510010 is for vacation expense of hourly workers and account 510011 is for vacation expense of salaried workers. Feature PPMOD assigns the value H for hourly workers and S for salaried workers. The IMG step Assign expense accounts (Figure 2) shows that symbolic account EVAC maps to G/L account 510010 for ESG grouping H and to account 510011 for ESG grouping S.

Figure 2

Map vacation expenses

Sometimes the accounting department changes the way it tracks expenses. Company X decided to start tracking vacation expense for exempt managers separately from the expense for non-exempt managers. Account 510011 is for exempt managers and account 510012 is for non-exempt managers. This change does not affect hourly employees. It seems simple because it takes a single group of employees (salaried) and divides them into two groups (exempt and non-exempt). This change requires some careful thought because symbolic accounts other than EVAC use the ESG grouping S and because vacation expenses before 1/1/2006 must post using the old rules.

First, update feature PPMOD to assign the value H for hourly employees, E for exempt managers, and N for non-exempt managers. The value S will no longer be used. You can delete ESG grouping S after you have deleted all posting entries that use it. Although the purpose of this change is to adjust the posting of vacation expense, you must update every posting that uses ESG groupings. You must copy each record twice in the IMG steps Assign financial accounts and Assign expense accounts with the ESG group value S to create records with the values E and N. Place the cursor on an entry with ESG value S and click on the copy button. Enter a new value for ESG on the copied record. Do not change any assigned G/L accounts at this time.

At company X, the posting for salary expense is a good example. Before the change, the wage types for salary mapped to symbolic account ESAL. The symbolic account ESAL with ESG grouping H assigns account 510001 while ESG grouping S assigns account 510002. Two new entries for ESAL are required because you’re now dividing salaried employees into groups E and N. Figure 3 shows that ESAL/E and ESAL/N both map to account 510002. You do not need a new symbolic account for salary expense because, while you added new ESG groups, you did not change the ultimate posting for any employees. It may be safe to delete all entries on table T030 with ESG value S at this point, but I leave these values on the table as a historical record.

Figure 3

Posting ESAL with new ESG values

A new symbolic account is required for vacation expense so that the existing mapping remains through 12/31/2005. Use the Define symbolic accounts step in the IMG to copy the current symbolic account to a new name. The new mapping is planned to take effect on 1/1/2006. You should update symbolic account EVAC in the same manner as all of the other existing symbolic accounts that used ESG grouping. EVAC/E and EVAC/N both post to account 510011. This retains the integrity of the existing posting rules. The new symbolic account, EVCN, maps to account 510010 for ESG H, 510011 for ESG E, and 510012 for ESG N.

In the IMG step Assign wage type posting attributes, delimit the vacation wage type on 1/1/2006 and assign the symbolic account EVCN from 1/1/2006 to 12/31/9999. EVAC remains associated with the wage type until 12/31/2005. Figure 4 shows this configuration. It is best to test these changes and move them to the production system before 1/1/2006. If you process payroll after 1/1/2006 before the changes are moved into the system, you need to force retroactive accounting back to 1/1/2006 after implementing the new configuration.

Figure 4

Vacation posting to different symbolic accounts in different time periods

A More Complex Example

Company Y posts expenses using two ESG groupings, 3 for hourly and 4 for salaried. Accounting has decided to classify employees as manufacturing, administrative, or sales. The manufacturing group contains both hourly and salaried employees involved in the manufacture of goods. The administrative and sales groups are entirely salaried employees. Figure 5 shows how employees map from the old groups to the new groups. If you introduced this design change during the testing and development phase of a new implementation, it would be no big deal. You would just eliminate the existing configuration and replace it with the new. However, if you make this change to a live system with existing posting documents, you must take a different approach.

Figure 5

Proposed ESG grouping changes

Recall that the previous example copied every record on table T030 and changed the old ESG grouping value to the new value. However, the resulting G/L account number did not change. This is impossible using the solution proposed in Figure 5, because the new manufacturing grouping consists of both former hourly (3) and salaried (4) employees. In the past these two groups of employees posted to different G/L accounts, so it is impossible to combine them and retain the integrity of the existing configuration.

Figure 6 shows a solution for this problem. By making groups for hourly manufacturing and salaried manufacturing, you can keep the historical groups and support the new ones at the same time. The new ESG grouping values are A for administrative, H for hourly manufacturing, M for salaried manufacturing, and S for sales.

Figure 6

Better ESG grouping assignment

Let’s look at one specific posting example. As shown in Figure 7, salary expense 1003 posts via symbolic account 1030 to account 30 for hourly employees and to account 31 for salaried employees. You need to copy the 1030/3 entry on table T030 to 1030/H and copy 1030/4 to 1030/A, 1030/M, and 1030/S. This enables the symbolic account 1030 to continue posting the same as before with the new ESG groupings in place (Figure 8). You create a new symbolic account, ESAL, to represent the updated posting of salary expense. Figure 9 shows the posting of symbolic account ESAL. Starting on the change implementation date, the system assigns the new symbolic account to the salary wage type. To avoid forced retro accounting, choose a date far enough in the future so that you can implement changes in the productive system before that date arrives.

Figure 7

Salary posting via symbolic account 1030 before changes

Figure 8

Salary posting via symbolic account 1030 after changes

Figure 9

Salary posting via symbolic account ESAL after changes

Keep Your FI Posting Configuration Healthy

The basic rule to follow when making FI posting configuration changes is don’t ever change the past. Newly added adjustments to the FI posting configuration should not alter the way that the system created existing posting documents.

This strategy ensures that you control when the posting changes take effect. It also guarantees that retroactive processes follow the correct set of rules. It keeps an accurate historical record of past posting rules. A few months or even a few years from now, anyone will be able to examine the HR to FI posting rules to see exactly how any single amount would have posted.

How Symbolic Accounts Work

Money flows from HR to FI as shown in Figure 1. Transaction PC00_M99_CIPE reads the wage types and their amounts from the payroll results cluster. Table T52EL determines which symbolic account to use to transfer the amount from payroll to the posting document. The symbolic account usually classifies the amount as an expense or a liability, although other classifications are possible.

Figure 1

Assign symbolic accounts to G/L accounts

Next, feature PPMOD assigns an ESG for each person and table T030 assigns a G/L account number for each combination of ESG and symbolic account. Finally, the system creates the posting document and stores it in several tables whose names start with PPD. You can view the posting documents via transaction PCP0.

Figure 2 shows the IMG section for posting to accounting. The step Define employee grouping/account assignment accesses the PPMOD feature. The step Define symbolic accounts updates table T52EK and allows you to specify whether or not the employee grouping will be used for each posting. The step Define wage type posting attributes allows you to maintain table T52EL. Use the steps Assign financial accounts and Assign expense accounts to maintain table T030.

Figure 2

Map vacation expenses

Clay Molinari

Clay Molinari has 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has been working as an SAP HR consultant since 1997. He is currently president of C&C Savant, Inc., an SAP consulting firm that specializes in combining standard SAP configuration and custom ABAP programming to help its clients solve unique or complicated requirements.

You may contact the author at claymolinari@comcast.ne.

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