SAP SuccessFactors Variable Pay organizes data from several sources (that is, employee historical information, company financial data, HR bonus plans) to pay out employee bonuses. At a high level, there are five separate .csv files configured during the implementation stage.
- Employee History – It contains the employee’s date effective history records. The variable pay module requires this information to determine bonus plan eligibility, bonus basis, and proration for each employee.
Employee history is stored and imported as a .csv file. During implementation, fields required for employee history file have been created by consultants. Modification to the order or attributes of original fields will require contacting Customer Success or the customer’s third-party vendor.
Information included in employee history file should only of those employees who are eligible for an incentive calculation. All employees must also have a record (either active or inactive) in the master user file (UDF).
- Business Goals – This information contains the business goal names, goal forecasts, targets and anchored payouts. The variable pay module requires this information to determine the goal-level payouts which impact the bonus calculation. Administrators normally will update the targets and results every bonus cycle.
- Bonus Plan Eligibility Rules – Eligibility rules define which bonus plan is used to calculate an employee's bonus for each assignment. Any field/value combination in the Employee History file can be chosen to determine the eligibility for the bonus plan.
- Bonus Plans – This contains the bonus plan section weights, payout function type, and bonus cap, if any.
- Business Goal Weights file – This file links the business goals to the bonus plans and assigns unique weights to this relationship.
Variable Pay Design
To get a basic understanding of how variable pay works, let's take a look at how the system is designed.
- A single Variable Pay template can contain multiple bonus plans.
- Each bonus plan can contain multiple business goals and their weights.
- Each business goal contains target amount, anchored payout, and payout function.
