Remember that when outsourcing any aspect of payroll, except for garnishments, it is usually best to coordinate your go-live with the start of a new year. This decreases implementation challenges because you can mitigate risks around year-to-date totals related to tax cumulations. The start of a new payroll year also takes out the challenges for retroactive accounting, because people typically avoid cross-tax year retroactivity in countries such as the US and Canada. However, many payroll departments and all of the outsourcing vendors’ high-quality resources are typically very busy during the end of the year. So, you might want to go live during mid-year.

Implementation

As you begin to implement payroll outsourcing, you should have a business strategy and criteria in place. Regardless of the outsourcing option you choose, implementation challenges arise, which largely depend on the following criteria and the decisions or strategy that you have around these criteria.

Extent of customization: The outsourced vendors typically like you to adapt as much of the standard solution from their system as possible. The implementation time line and cost are less if you can do so. Similar to any payroll implementation, your implementation will be faster and cheaper if your environment is standardized. For example, having fewer payroll areas and wage types makes it easier to manage and reduce maintenance costs. You have to send data from your SAP HCM system to the vendor’s payroll system whether or not the vendor has an SAP system.

SAP and non-SAP systems: If the outsourced vendor has an SAP system environment, then the transition and the building and operations of the interfaces are more straightforward. If the vendor has a non-SAP system environment, however, then due to everything from terminology to the interface design, the complexity is greater. Vendors with non-SAP systems may be more common because most of the ADP systems were non-SAP until ADP released GlobalView.

Distributed versus centralized environment: If you built your system’s environment strategy with SAP (i.e., the HR, Time, Benefits, or Financial Accounting modules in SAP), then the implementation of the interfaces and the runtime environment is easier to manage.

Technology and tools: Much like using a distributed versus centralized environment, the technology and tools that you use also have an impact on outsourcing. For example, use secured file transfer protocol (FTP) and file encryption to reduce the risks around sensitive data transfers.

Involvement of information technology (IT): Traditionally, there is a debate concerning who should control payroll implementations. In many cases, the HR and business departments control payroll. In an outsourcing environment, involving the IT department is crucial. Outsourcing environments are very interface intensive, so they need support and commitment from companies’ IT teams. Typically, interfaces for Benefits, Time clocking, Financials postings, and similar systems are required in an outsourcing environment. In addition, you need to monitor the interface between SAP and the vendor’s payroll system. Therefore, the outsourcing environment has more interface challenges. For example, for the first few payrolls after go-live, you’ll require IT support to send and receive files from the vendor. Subsequently, you can transition the interface runs to payroll departments, shared services centers, or similar support organizations. You can then reduce or discontinue IT’s involvement. The interfaces do create a challenge on the process side too, but for now I’m limiting this discussion to the technical impacts.

Now that I’ve covered general implementation considerations, I’ll describe the challenges in implementing each of the five outsourcing options — check printing, tax filing, garnishments processing, gross to net, and full payroll processing.

Check Printing

When choosing this option, you might face several implementation challenges involving standardization and outsourcing technology and tools.

Standardization: The potential areas where you can use standardization include the following:

• Number of forms for pay stubs and checks: Whenever possible, you should introduce a standard form across multiple business units. This reduces both development efforts and on-going operations costs for printing.
  
  
• Number of house banks: House banks have additional configuration and the pre-Data Medium Exchange (DME) programs in SAP are dependent on the house banks. If you can reduce the number of house banks, the implementation and operational costs decrease. DME programs are standard SAP-delivered programs for bank transfers.
  
  
• Standards to access Employee Self-Service (ESS) and allowing employees to print their own pay stubs: By having employees print their own pay stubs, companies can stop printing and mailing them, which normally results in big savings. However, it is important to manage the transition and ensure that employees have access to a kiosk or a similar infrastructure to print the pay stubs themselves.
  
  
• Off-cycle payrolls: It is best to reduce the number of off-cycle payrolls. Companies can introduce policies to move changes to the next regular payroll cycle. They should also use off-cycle payroll sparingly. For example, you should produce an off-cycle check only in worst-case scenarios, such as an employee missing a full payment during the regular payroll cycle. The payroll vendors can potentially charge extra money for every off-cycle processing that they carry out.

Technology and tools: Be careful of the following technology risks, which arise especially due to the time sensitivity of check printing:

• Interface: The data elements required for checks and pay stubs are sent over from your payroll system to the vendor’s system. Users should sufficiently test the scenarios. For instance, users should check if pay stubs overflow onto more than one page and if the interface can manage this.
  
  
• Printers: Challenges can arise due to hardware and software differences between your payroll system and the printer’s. If you add a new wage type with special characters in the text, for example, the printer might fail to recognize them. You need to plan for a testing strategy with vendors every time that you introduce such changes.
  
  
• Language: In case you are operating in multilingual environments, such as Canada and Latin America, you must ensure that the vendor is able to print the checks and pay stubs in all multilingual scenarios.
  
  
• Single sign-on requirements: Problems could arise if employees can access pay stubs from your portal or if a link from your portal takes employees to the vendor’s Web site where they can access the pay stubs. The preferred solution is always having a single sign-on so that the employee only logs in with his or her own user name and password instead of worrying about a multi-system environment behind the scenes.
  
  
• Major events, such as bonuses or a merit increase of union contract negotiations: Ensure that you alert the vendor’s support organization. Also, try to avoid the occurrence of such major events while you are transitioning to the outsourced vendor environment. While you are trying to resolve the go-live issues, you might not be able to isolate the issues between your regular runs and issues caused by the special events.

If you have decided to outsource your check printing, you should consider the following implementation tips:

• Outsource check printing, tax filing, and garnishment processing to a single vendor whenever possible to ease management and perhaps obtain a better contract and decreased rates
  
  
• Although going live with this option at the start of the new year is easiest, you can implement the check printing option at any point during the year. Also, remember that the start of the new payroll year varies in different countries. Outsourcing check printing does not exchange any updates of data between your environment and the vendor’s environment.
  
  
• Think about re-engineering and changing your pay stub because the perfect time to do so is when you are beginning to outsource your check printing. For example, if you have multiple pay stub designs across different units in your organization, this is the time to consolidate them into a single form.
  
  
• Ensure that the vendor is not holding your funds for excessively long periods prior to payroll distribution (e.g., from the time you transfer the money to its account to the actual distribution). This could mean a loss of interest on the large amount of money involved in an entire payroll. This depends on fiduciary aspects in vendor contract.

Tax Filing

The tax filing services offered by an outsourced vendor require implementation of the SAP tax-outsourcing functionality. This is a simple functionality available through menu path USA>Outsourcing>Tax Services. This functionality is only applicable for US and Canadian payroll. It is possible that many other countries have vendors offering this service and you may want to consider this. Unlike check printing, you do not need a great deal of consolidation or re-engineering scope when outsourcing tax filing. If you are operating in a multi-tax authority environment in different geographic locations, you have to process taxes in all these environments. If you decide to outsource tax filing, you should consider several criteria.

Standardization:

• Using the tax authority locator tools: This is a challenge in an SAP environment if you are dealing with local tax authorities that are driven by street addresses rather than zip codes. Most payroll users know these local tax authorities. For example, in the US local taxes apply to certain states, such as Pennsylvania. During testing, users need to ensure that the testing is comprehensive enough to cover such cases.
  
  
• Retroactive adjustments: You have more challenges with reconciliation if there are retroactive adjustments, especially ones that extend later in the calendar year. You can manage this challenge in two ways. One is to enforce discipline to reduce them at the time of go-live and the other is to use reconciliation reports between the two environments during testing and after go-live.
  
  
• Year-end adjustments: When you are implementing SAP Payroll with taxes in an SAP environment, year-end adjustments (using infotype 0221) are relatively easy to handle. You can look at payroll results as well as tax tables and simulate the adjustment runs. Or you could even repeat the runs until the tax results are correct. However, when your tax filing is outsourced, you may not have similar flexibility. You can continue to use the tax reporter (PU19) as your tool within SAP, which you can use when dealing with W-2 forms and other tax reporting items. Although you might not be using the tax reporter for tax filing, nothing prevents you from using the tool for your simulated testing. Simulation testing assists you in verifying the output for W-2, 941, or SUI reporting.
  
  
• Timing: If you are unable to implement at the start of the new year, then the beginning of the next quarter is a good time to do so. You need to talk to the vendor about a quarter-to-date (QTD) data transfer from your payroll system to the vendor’s tax filing system. It is always easier to capture the year-to-date and QTD-cumulated balances rather than loading period-by-period payroll results into any payroll or tax system.

Technology and tools: In a standard SAP system, you do have a payroll reconciliation report that helps you to reconcile among the payroll clusters, results adjustments, and tax tables. You can access this report in US Payroll by following menu path Subsequent Activities>Per Payroll Period>Lists>Payroll Reconciliation Report. The outsourced vendor should provide you with a similar report to reconcile between the vendor system and your payroll system. During implementation, you should be able to learn about these available tools. In addition, you also need a loop back from the vendor system to your financials system or, alternatively, a report detailing when the HR payee (e.g., the IRS, state, or local authorities) was actually paid.

Keep the following implementation tips in mind if you decide to outsource tax filing:

• Outsource check printing, tax filing, and garnishment processing whenever possible to a single vendor for ease of management and perhaps better rates
  
  
• The tax filing implementation should preferably be at the beginning of the year or beginning of a quarter
  
  
• Each tax authority has its own challenge, so users should ensure testing for all applicable tax authorities, including federal, state, and local, as well as any unique testing required for some of the state and local tax authorities
  
  
• Make sure that testing covers exception-based test cases such as earned income credit and overpayments- related test cases where you run infotype 0221 adjustments

Garnishments Processing

The discussion on garnishments is very similar to the one concerning tax filing. This topic is mostly applicable for users in the US and Canada because the concept of garnishment is not applicable in many countries. The timing for the implementation when outsourcing garnishments is very flexible. You can implement the outsourced solution at almost any pay period and should convert garnishments data during the year using SAP infotypes 0194 and 0195.

When outsourcing garnishments, the acknowledgement and reconciliation challenges are also very similar to outsourcing tax filing.

Remember these implementation tips for the garnishments outsourcing option:

• When transitioning from an in-house to an outsourced vendor, you need employee communication and a change management plan
  
  
• Ensure that testing covers test cases with multiple garnishments because you need to verify the disposable net income calculations
  
  
• In some cases, the garnishment check needs to be accompanied by formatted advice and communication. You should consider this when outsourcing garnishments. Some vendors offer services such as managing the phone calls and employee queries for garnishments. Typically, it is recommended to go with that option since you can save on operation and resource costs.

Gross to Net

For both gross to net, as well as full payroll outsourcing, the implementation challenges are very similar to a new SAP Payroll implementation.

Retroactivity: If you are implementing the outsourced solution from a new tax year, which mostly occurs in the US and Canada, you will not go retroactive in previous tax years. In many countries, however, as well as in some cases such as collective bargaining agreements, implementations do need to go across tax years with retrocalculations. You should decide the strategy for such situations, which should likely consist of manual calculations or feeding taxable income figures to payroll systems. If your implementation goes live during the year, then you need to finalize the strategy with the vendor. If the volumes are not too high, then perhaps manual adjustments will work. By using reconciliation reports and keeping payroll control records in sync in both environments, you can manage this challenge.

Managing control record and payroll calendars: You need to synchronize the payroll areas in SAP, the related control record, and the corresponding calendars in the vendor’s payroll system. Most of the outsourcing vendor solutions are standard solutions and have a recommended methodology.

Off-cycle payrolls: As we discussed in Part 1 of this article, you must reexamine the off- cycle payroll strategy. The reexamination could consist of assessing the reasons for off-cycle payrolls and combining them with regular payroll, or reaching out to employees and unions and evaluating the possibility to eliminate off-cycle payrolls. Elimination or reduction in off-cycle payrolls will translate to operational savings. If your organization is running daily off-cycles, reexamining this strategy shouldn’t be difficult because you need to execute the interface every time you run the off-cycle payroll to send the details over to vendor payroll system. In addition, if you have outsourced check printing and tax filing, you need an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the off-cycle payroll with provisions concerning factors such as turnaround time. In the gross to net scenario, you don’t have the capability to do tax processing (in the absence of a BSI tax factory implementation). Therefore, you definitely need to send the off-cycle payrolls to an outsourced vendor. I have come across many countries outside of the US and Canada that do not run off-cycle payrolls.

Reversals: Similar to off-cycle payment runs, you must consider the reversals for when certain situations arise (e.g., you ran the payroll for an employee who never joined the organization and therefore need to reverse the results). Payroll departments run reversals. The reversals make outsourcing gross-to-net payroll even more complicated because financial postings are involved. Think of this scenario: You run your gross payroll and the outsourced vendor runs your net payroll. You bring back the payroll results in your payroll system and then you run a financial posting program in your SAP system. In this example, the reversals are relatively easy. However, if the financial posting interface is run directly from your outsourced vendor’s system, then the reversals are trickier because you must manage the posting reversals from the vendor’s system interface. In both scenarios, you need to ensure that payroll results are reversed in both systems.

• Year-end adjustment runs: The year-end adjustment runs when outsourcing gross-to-net payroll can cause more challenges than when outsourcing tax filing. In the gross-to-net scenario, you will not have BSI or tax-calculation capability in your SAP system. Typically, you need to run iterative scenarios between your SAP Payroll system and the vendor’s system until you get the taxable and tax figures right. Users in the US need to remember that the year-end adjustment runs in the US have challenges for pre-tax and post-tax deductions and hence, the iterations are necessary in some cases.
  
  
• Bring payroll results back from the vendor’s system to your SAP Payroll system: This is one of the most commonly discussed implementation issues, and there is a divide of opinion on whether to bring back the payroll results. If you are running SAP Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling modules, however, the decision is relatively easy because you need to bring back the results for postings. If you are not running SAP FI and perhaps just SAP HCM, you don’t need to worry about bringing back the results because with SAP HCM, you do not need these results for posting to financial systems. In the Outsourcing menu in SAP Payroll, you select the Import sub- menu to import the payroll results. In some situations, implementation teams also customize the schemas or use the ULK9 schema before importing the payroll results. In bringing back the payroll results, you gain the ability to run reports from the net payroll results.
  
  
• Reporting: When the payroll results are not brought back into your SAP system for financial postings and your reporting requirements need it, then you might want to consider the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) option to bring back payroll results and then carrying out reporting from the BI InfoProvider.

You should take the following implementation tips into account when outsourcing gross to net payroll:

• Consider outsourcing check printing and tax filing with the gross-to-net option. Logically speaking, you do not want to bring back payroll results to print the checks in-house, and if you do not have BSI or tax processing, then you are better off outsourcing the tax filing.
  
  
• This outsourcing option demands additional training for payroll users. An example of a payroll user is a person who handles payroll transactions in a shared service center environment or a user who is involved with running of payroll. The payroll operational users need to be trained in regular and off-cycle payrolls. The training should cover the topics of data maintenance and payroll runtime.
  
  
• Before embarking on this implementation option, ensure that you have evaluated the full payroll processing option completely. You could have a better cost advantage by outsourcing your full payroll processing rather than keeping just the gross payroll in-house. By keeping gross payroll in-house and outsourcing only the net payroll to vendor, you have to continue with operational costs for the payroll department.

Full Payroll Processing

When outsourcing your full payroll processing, you are likely to find several implementation challenges.

Requirements and design: You need to stay standardized as much possible, including your wage type catalogues, payroll schemas, and usage of standard payroll rules. Outsourced vendors use a shared environment and like to use the payroll environment across multiple customers to make it cost effective. The implementation costs from the vendor will be lower based on the standard environment and the vendors will potentially charge more to configure a customized environment.

Questions to ask: Many of the issues that arise with the gross-to-net option do not occur in this scenario because your entire payroll environment is with the vendor. SAP is the system of record. To help determine the boundaries for your SAP HR and the vendor’s payroll systems, and to establish a clear system-of- records concept, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Are we keeping all data related to infotypes 0014 and 0015 in our SAP system?
  
  
• Are we better off outsourcing the garnishments and not maintaining the data in our SAP system?
  
  
• When we do off-cycle payrolls using infotype 0267, should we maintain that data in SAP and then use an interface or simply use the vendor’s payroll system?
  
  
• Should the time clocking system feed data to our SAP system or is it cost effective to directly take that data to the vendor’s payroll system?
  
  
• Should our interfacing strategy be such that we maximize the interfaces directly from the vendor’s system or should we be the “owner” and use our SAP system as an exchange hub for that data?

Consider these implementation tips when outsourcing full payroll processing:

• Plan and implement interfaces carefully for this option. The key is to determine the boundary systems environment, especially those around Benefits and time clocking. Boundary systems are those systems that interface with payroll systems. For example, if you outsource your benefits too, it’s best if the benefits-outsourcing vendor can work with the payroll-outsourcing vendor. You should decide if you still want to keep the time evaluation with your system and then send the data to the vendor’s payroll system. Typically, time evaluation isn’t outsourced in both the cases of benefits and payroll.
  
  
• Be sure that the SLA with your outsourced vendor includes a provision for tax rate and regulation changes. For example, you should implement tax rates within a predetermined number of days after authorities announce them.

To incorporate these implementation tips, you need an implementation strategy. Detailed discussions with your outsourced vendor are helpful even before you start your implementation.

Operations

Operational challenges can arise based on the following criteria and the decisions or strategy that impact the criteria:

Retroactivity: Retroactivity and keeping the payroll and your SAP HR systems in sync, such as operational procedures to “Exit,” the payroll control record, and moving out of payroll period, is difficult. Exit operational procedure is done for the payroll control record. The challenge becomes even greater with problems such as overpayments and claims processing with retroactivity. Therefore, it is always a good idea to keep the payroll areas in alignment between your system and the vendor’s. It’s a very basic suggestion but it tends to make the operations much simpler. This ensures that the payroll calendars are aligned between your system and the vendor’s.

System of records: As users have to run interfaces between your SAP HR system and the vendor’s payroll system, users start taking shortcuts. In some situations, they go directly into the payroll system for data maintenance. During implementation, you need to establish the controls and ensure that the vendor’s payroll system does not give data maintenance access, especially if you decide to use SAP as your system of record. You can achieve this by planning the security roles and authorizations in both the vendor system and your SAP system.

Reporting and drill-down capabilities: If your payroll results are in the vendor’s payroll system and the rest of the HR data is in your system, combined reporting is complicated. SAP NetWeaver BI is an easy solution to this challenge. An alternate approach is to run the reports in your vendor’s system.

Ownership of customized objects and data: In certain cases, the outsourced vendor might decide to keep the ownership of custom objects or even configuration. This is a good point to address during contract negotiations. You should include a clause in the contract with your outsourced vendor that the company owns these payroll objects (not the vendor), in case you decide to end the outsourcing arrangement or use the system in-house.

Flexibility: When payroll systems are in-house and your IT staff is available, users develop a sense of flexibility, even if it may be a false impression. Users become used to making last minute changes or customizations. In outsourced environments, this flexibility disappears. However, a solid consolidation and process exercise prior to your implementation will prove that the requirement of such flexibility is derived more from the fear of losing existing systems. Appropriate change management and transformation initiatives can help the users to adapt to the new environment and solve their frustrations.

Acquisitions and divestments: Some companies have a business model built around acquisitions and divestments strategy, while some believe in organic growth. If your environment falls into the first category, then you need to be careful with the vendor contract as well as with the overall design and operations strategy. For example, make sure your provisions include how you plan to add a new payroll area in the future or how you plan to add mass employees in an existing payroll area. The vendor contract can address potential organic growth numbers as well.

A centralized versus a distributed user base: If the data maintenance and payroll runtime environments are distributed, you may face some challenges. For example, if you have a good shared service center environment, then you can have central, standard data maintenance. However, if you have HR and payroll users distributed in business units instead, managing the schedules with payroll control record status becomes more difficult. This is a good time to establish the much-needed shared service center approach that most analysts and strategists recommend.

Now that I’ve discussed general operational challenges, I will explain some operational challenges for the five outsourcing scenarios.

Check Printing

If you decide to outsource check printing, you might come across the following operational challenges:

Security: Consider scanned signatures for check signing authorities and vendor controls

Check stocks maintenance: Ensure that you maintain and reconcile the check number ranges, using test cases for reversals and cancellation of checks

Off-cycle check printing: Determine if retaining the capability to print off-cycle checks in-house using your system would mean less cost advantages. Although possibly more convenient, retaining such additional capabilities in-house requires more maintenance and resources costs.

Cancellations: You need to have a plan in place to inform the vendor system if checks are cancelled. This ensures that check number reconciliation and updates to the employee history have occurred.

Bank reconciliations: During your bank reconciliations file upload process, the interfaces of the vendor’s system and your financial system need to be in sync. For example, both you and your vendor need to be aware of a cancelled check in your bank reconciliation system.

Tax Filing

The operational challenges below might arise when you outsource tax filing:

Reconciliations: Whether this challenge arises depends on how the vendor organizes his or her tables and database to maintain the tax wage types. If the vendors maintain them per payroll totals and dynamically sum them up for quarterly and annual reporting, then you only need to send the tables once per regular payroll period. Alternatively, some vendors may want you to send a separate interface for quarterly and annual reporting. Check with your vendor for more details and do not forget about off-cycle payrolls, too.

Year-end adjustments: You need to test and, in some situations, individually verify the year-end adjustments cases. For example, you may have to adjust the taxable base and tax figures for some employees due to errors. The year-end adjustment runs are necessary for many reasons, including data entry errors, late tax rates updates, and incorrect pre-tax deductions.

Garnishments Processing

Garnishments are only applicable to US payroll users. If you working in a US payroll system, consider these operational challenges if you decide to outsource garnishments:

Maintaining interfaces: If you are using SAP as a total system of records and decide to maintain garnishment data (infotypes 0194 and 0195) yourself, then you should send the data to the vendor’s system. Also, if the payroll is not outsourced, then you may only want the vendor to manage the garnishments based on the data and deductions that your system sends via the interface. If you outsource your payroll to the same vendor who is processing garnishments, then the deductions will already be available in the vendor’s system. As I discussed earlier, it makes a lot of sense to go with a single vendor for both options.

Disposable net income regulation changes: You and the vendor need to be aligned with the same disposable net income rules and policies for all the authorities that you are dealing with. Disposable net income calculations are dependent on the calculation models of each US state.

Gross to Net

When outsourcing gross to net payroll, be mindful of these operational challenges:

Bonus runs: With bonuses, commissions, and similar off-cycle runs, you must ensure that all your interfaces, third-party remittances, and financial postings are carried out like regular payroll runs. For example, bonuses and commissions might have specific wage types that your regular payroll runs do not have.

Retroactivity issues: Provide sufficient time and resources for testing. This is also a good area for change and transition in case you are looking for more opportunities to reduce the time spent on reconciliations.

Off-cycle reversals: Managing the reversals and associated posting implications is always a challenge in the gross to net scenario. During the design and implementation stage of the project, create a very detailed business process for the reversals. Also, for the reversals and cancellations, you need a good operational procedure that creates a structured approach for users, rather than the case-by-case, calculator-based reconciliation approach that is normally adopted.

Support Packages: Every implementation has normal schedules and procedures to apply and test Support Packages. However, if Support Packages have an impact on net payroll (e.g., deductions, which are maintained in SAP and processed as net payroll in the vendor’s system), you must test these scenarios. It helps if you and the vendor establish the testing procedures for Support Packages, as well as create reuseable testing scenarios for every Support Package in the future.

Deductions not taken: Arrears and deductions not taken are common operational challenges in the gross-to-net payroll outsourcing scenario. In most situations, the vendor payroll systems maintain the appropriate tables and handle those in the subsequent payrolls. Nevertheless, there could be difficult scenarios. For instance, an employee is on sabbatical leave and the pre-tax health plan deductions are in arrears. As per the company policies, however, the employee has self paid for the entire duration ahead of time. You need to include such exception-based conditions in testing prior to go-live.

Full Payroll Processing

The operational challenges for outsourcing full payroll processing are:

System of records: When users start maintaining the data directly in the vendor’s payroll system, SAP soon ceases to be the true system of records. Some implementations then begin to reconcile the two systems unnecessarily. You should address this issue right at the source with one of several possible solutions. Do not allow users to maintain the data in the vendor’s payroll system and only allow sending interfaces. Run an audit report on a weekly basis in both systems to verify that this is happening. The payroll calendars and schedules also have an effect on this area because users tend to maintain the data directly in the vendor’s system when they are hard pressed for time. If you can enforce a cut-off date discipline in your payroll processing (i.e. transactions after a certain cut-off date will be entered for the next payroll period), users will be less stressed in carrying out last minute changes.

Adding a business unit or merging the payroll areas: In some unique situations, you might acquire or divest business units. Such consolidation situations affect the payroll areas as well as corresponding structures in vendor payroll system. It may be worthwhile to create a business process and test cases to handle the situation, even if they aren’t in demand at the time of your implementation.

Satish Badgi

Satish Badgi has been helping clients implement SAP ERP HCM and payroll for more than 15 years. He has been involved with large full-scale SAP ERP HCM and payroll implementations using the breadth and depth of SAP modules. Satish works for a large management and systems integration consulting firm and handles global payroll for clients. He has published two books on SAP payroll, Configuring US Benefits with SAP and Practical SAP US Payroll.

You may contact the author at sbadgi@comcast.net.

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