If your company uses negative time quotas to allow employees to exceed their annual leave entitlements, you can use a standard report and infotype 0416 (time quota compensation) to quickly and simply reduce their entitlements for the following year by the amount they have already taken.

Key Concept

Time quota in SAP ERP HCM refers to an employee’s leave entitlement. An HR time administrator generates and awards leave entitlement to an employee on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis, depending on an organization’s business rules. As of SAP R/3 4.0B, users store employee absences in infotype 2001 and enter available absence quotas or leave entitlement in infotype 2006. If (as is commonly the case) an employee exceeds his absence quota entitlements, companies need to be able to effectively and efficiently manage it in the system without a lot of time and effort. Negative quotas allow employees to exceed their stated entitlements.

Consider this common problem. An employee is eligible for 25 days annual leave from 01/01/08 until 12/31/08 plus five days over and above the leave entitlement (known as a negative quota). When the employee goes on annual leave, SAP ERP HCM should allow him to take 25 days plus five days over and above his entitlement, which is adjusted with the following year’s quota. So what do you do if the employee uses the five days over and above his entitlement and is eligible for only 20 days of annual leave in 2009 (from 01/01/09 to 12/31/09)?

There are two common business scenarios to solve this problem, which I have named scenario 1 and scenario 2. In the first part of my series (see my article “Align SAP Time Management with Your Company’s Time Quota Requirements”), I showed you how to how to solve the problem using scenario 1. In this article, I will show you how to solve it using scenario 2. You generate the standard report of the negative leave balances, generate the following year’s quota, and then reduce it by uploading the negative figures into infotype 0416 (quota compensation for your country grouping) using SAP Legacy System Migration Workbench (SAP LSMW).

Note
If the system generates the quotas through time evaluation schema RPTIME00, then you can easily adjust the following year’s quota by using infotype 2013, which is meant for quota corrections. However, you can only use it if the quota is generated through positive time evaluation.

Note
This method is not relevant if your company allows an employee to go over the entitlement and doesn’t reduce from the following year’s quota. I have seen many companies that allow employees to exceed their quota up to a maximum of three days and then don’t penalize them.

Negative Deduction

Negative deduction doesn’t reconcile the existing quota or future quota, so it is difficult to adjust the following year’s quota without a proper planned approach. If you have already activated negative deduction but are finding it difficult to reconcile and deduct from the following year’s quota, you can follow the step-by-step approach shown in Figure 1.

Tip!
Negative deduction to the quota refers to the value in hours or days by which the time quota can be deducted over and above the entitlement.

Employee uses the negative entitlement, and the company wants to adjust this with the following year’s quota

Figure 1

Process flow for absences quota adjustments

Step 1. Generate the standard report for your required group. Your required group can be whatever you need, such as a group of employees in the Personnel area or individual personnel numbers. You can run the report to your own specific requirements. The menu path is SAP Easy Access > Human Resources > Time management > Administration > Information system > Report selection > Time accounts > Display Absence Quota information (Figure 2). The transaction for this report is PT_QTA10.

Figure 2

Generate a standard report for an employee’s absence quota

In my example, I provided the selection criteria for Personnel Number, Personnel area, and Deduction period. You can run report RPTQTA10 for the required selection criteria (Figure 3) using transaction PT_QTA10. The menu path is SAP Easy Access > Human Resources > Time management > Administration > Information system > Time accounts > Display Absence Quota information (PT_QTA10).

Figure 3

Display the absence quota information

You need only the Pers. No. (personnel number), Name, and Total remain (total remaining) fields for your report. Download only these three fields and hide the other fields (Figure 4). You can perform the download in two ways: you can highlight the non-required fields to select them, right-click the selection, and then select Hide on the context menu. Or you can download everything into Excel and remove the unwanted columns.

Figure 4

Display the absence quota information report with only the required fields

Download the data into Excel by clicking the local file icon. Delete the unwanted fields and then convert the file into a text table limited format (convenient format for an SAP LSMW upload) as required for an LSMW upload.

Step 2. Activate infotype 0416. Use menu path SPRO > Personnel management > Personnel administration > Customizing Procedures > Infotypes > Assign infotype to Countries. Click the New Entries button. Enter the following details in the New Entries screen (Figure 5) and then save the information:

Infotype (ITy…): 0416
Subtype (STyp): * (this refers to all subtypes)
Country grouping (CGr…): 33 (this refers to my example, Russia)
Permitted ( Perm…): selected

Figure 5

Activate the infotypes for the required country grouping

Now, configure the required subtypes. Follow menu path SPRO > Personnel management > Personnel administration > Payroll data > Leave compensation > Time quota compensation > Define Time quota compensation methods. Click the New Entries button.

Enter the relevant employee subgroup (ESG) and personnel subgroup (PSGpg) groupings shown in Figure 6. The ESG grouping refers to an employee subgroup grouping for time quota types. It is a grouping of employee subgroups for which the same absence and attendance quota types are defined. The PSGpg grouping refers to a grouping of personnel subareas for time quota types. It is a division of personnel subareas for which the same absence quota types and attendance quota types are defined. The compensation method (Comp. meth.) refers to a time quota compensation method (compensation method for short) that forms the subtype for infotype 0416. In this example, I use 9 for the ESG for my Russian ESG configuration. The compensation method is 0002 for Negative quota. Choose the relevant quota type (here it is 01 for Standard leave) and click the save icon.

Figure 6

Configure the new time quota compensation type

Step 3. Generate the vacation quotas for the following year. Follow the usual methods you use at the beginning of the year (i.e., generate the new year quota for year 2009 for all employees) using the standard program RPTQTA00 in negative time management. Now you upload the flat file in infotype 0416. The flat file should have the following information: Employee number, Start date (01/01/2009), Subtype (0002), and the number of hours or days to compensate.

Alternatively, if the number of records is relatively small (if you have only 10 or 15 employee records to update), you can update them directly via transaction PA30, as shown in Figure 7. Follow menu path SAP Easy Access > SAP Menu > Human Resources > Personnel management > Administration > HR master data > Maintain. Enter the relevant personnel number (20327), infotype (0416), and subtype (0002) and click the create icon.

Figure 7

Create the master data for infotype 0416 in transaction PA30

Now enter 1 in the No. to compensate field, and click the save icon. If you check infotype 2006 for this employee for the 2009 quota, the system shows the deduction of one day (Figure 8).

Figure 8

The employee’s 2009 available absences are deducted by one day

To confirm that the adjustment has happened, run report RPTQTA10 again. Then, enter the parameters shown in Figure 9 and click the execute icon.

Figure 9

Confirm that the employee only has 24 available absences

Raghavendran Parthasarathy

Raghavendran Parthasarathy works for Hexaware Technologies as a Principal Consultant,where he manages SAP solution design for customers across the globe. He has worked in SAP ERP HCM for over 14 years in various capacities, including payroll projects in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. In addition to payroll, Raghavendran has experience in negative time management, personnel administration, and recruitment. He has also been a part of portal implementations. Currently, he is involved with cloud-based HCM applications such as SAP SuccessFactors and Workday.

You may contact the author at raghs99@yahoo.com.

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