Running Payroll Using the Payroll Control Center (PCC)

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to navigate PCC and run payroll

Navigating in PCC and Running Payroll

About This Lesson

As the basis for all following tasks, you'll learn about core functionalities of Payroll Control Center (PCC), and how PCC optimizes the payroll process. You’ll be able to construct more efficient payroll control centers for your customers. Many units include practical examples and exercises for creating payroll objects using SAP SuccessFactors PCC.

Features and Functions of Payroll Control Center (PCC)

PCC encompasses a set of user-friendly interfaces designed to oversee and execute the entire payroll process. It empowers administrators to streamline their daily payroll management tasks, enhancing their efficiency. PCC introduces a contemporary approach by automating all payroll activities, effectively eliminating numerous time-consuming tasks.

Features of PCC include the following:

  • Fully automated end-to-end payroll process
  • Transparency over the entire payroll process
  • Automated root cause analytics for solution-focused troubleshooting

Running Payroll from PCC

Throughout the course, you’ll learn how to prepare and run payroll from PCC. Running payroll from PCC refers to a sequence of steps and activities that are monitored throughout the process. This process involves a progression of tasks, and each task can be customized or automated or both.

Let’s look at this process at a high level.

Step 1: Customize the Payroll Process Type in the back end

During this step, you’ll be working in the back end to set up the payroll process type. This is typically only done once at the onset of a project, and only small corrections are needed from time to time.

Step 2: Prepare Payroll Process based on the Payroll Process Type

During this step, you’ll be working in the front end to define the most important settings. For example, employees (over payroll area), validation rules (over policy), analytics. You need to update and add new payroll periods. This step is iterative in nature.

Step 3: Customize/configure teams for the monitoring process

During this step, you’ll be helping clients run important calculations, which are designed to catch potential errors. When you run a monitoring process, you create more visibility in each pay period and catch issues at an earlier stage than traditional payroll. By creating different teams in the system, issues are automatically routed to the appropriate team that can solve the issue (HR versus Accounting, for example).

Step 4: Run the payroll process!

With everything set up, you’re ready to help your customers run payroll.

Advantages of Using PCC in Your Payroll Process

Benefits of Payroll Control Center

There are many advantages when using PCC.

With traditional payroll, organizations were forced to run far more off-cycles than necessary due to lack of visibility.

Benefits of Payroll Control Center

Payroll systems and payroll processes today are mainly influenced by the big topic of legislation and regulations. Over decades, legal authorities, unions and other groups have written in stone how and when employees must be paid, how and when certain data of the employee’s payroll must be reported to those legal authorities, and so on.

We can see that all payroll related processes are designed around key deadlines (for example, for taxes, social insurance, and so on). Missing a key deadline has a negative impact for employers, thus they do everything to meet them.

This is the process comparison of traditional payroll versus Payroll Control Center.

A payroll system is a calculation engine, a simplified form of two components.

  • One component is the place where data is stored, the payroll database, as a foundation.
  • The other component includes mainly the parts for the calculation, reporting, and so on.

Consequently, programs were typically executed as overnight batch processes. Based on this principle, employers wait if they can produce their final payrolls and, consequently, take a small-time window for processing into account.

The challenge now is to find all the obstacles that prevent a payroll from being in time and compliant within this small-time window. If not in time and compliant, this can result in lots of questions from employees about their payroll or penalties from authorities.

Because these systems are mainly designed for expert users, there is the need for a big team of payroll experts (who have deep system knowledge) who work using lists, home-grown tools, spreadsheets, and so on to find the famous needle in the haystack.

A fully automated system that leverages SAP’s promise of "run simple". It represents the next generation of payroll processing automation.

Payroll Control Center has the following three components:

  1. A state-of-the-art user interface that is simple to use, so people can do their job fast and efficiently.
  2. The Payroll Control Center Core automates the complete end-to-end payroll process, enables real time identification of all policy deviations, and actively pushes them to the right people.
  3. Finally, the know how component holds the logic that automatically finds the famous needle in the haystack.

The knowledge that is stored today in people’s head will be transferred to and stored in the know how component.

Suddenly, the complete knowledge of all experts will be available to everyone in the company in a standardized way.

  • This includes not only the knowledge on how to find policy deviations but also on how to solve them.
  • To guarantee real time availability of all of this knowledge, the logic is added to the database.

  • The challenge is to find out how the experts find the needle in the haystack and how they solve problems; once this is on a piece of paper there are lots of techies that can do the "push down" quickly.

  • The better the know how component, the simpler your payroll and payroll process becomes; then "The Best Payroll is the One You Don’t See" is a real.

Finally, with the help of Payroll Control Center, payroll is available at any time and not just during the critical path.

Payroll Control Center automatically finds the policy violations in real time and pushes them to the right people.

Note

Because knowledge of experts is now standardized and available in the system to everyone, people working with Payroll Control Center do not need to be experts in the traditional way that it used to be necessary. Less staff is required too.

Payroll Control Center is a unique innovation from SAP. It is a new payroll experience.

PCC Main Features

  • Payroll Control Center is the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central dashboard providing new user experiences along with process improvements.
  • It's a collection of user interfaces used to manage and run the complete payroll process.
    • Regular payrolls
    • Off-cycle payrolls
The screen shows a few samples of PPC features.

The main features of PCC are the following:

  • Fully automated end-to-end process
  • Works off declustered pay results
  • Full transparency over the end-to-end process
  • Automated root cause analytics
  • Audit and compliance trails with identification of all who-did-what-and-when in the complete end-to-end process

It's for Free!

  • No license or ongoing cost to use PCC
  • Included in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll license
  • Included in SAP ERP HCM and H4S4 Payroll perpetual license subscription
  • Included for free and available to all SAP SuccessFactors customers

Distinction Between Continuous and Productive Payroll

Now that you’ve learned about the advantages of using PCC, let’s take a deeper dive into how continuous payroll works.

Unlike traditional payroll processes, continuous payroll allows companies to have a higher level of transparency over their payroll, starting from the first to the last days of any given pay cycle.

The following table illustrates other differences you can expect when using PCC.

 Traditional PayrollContinuous Payroll
When do cycles run?Strictly at the end of the pay cycleAt any time before production payroll runs
When does the business gain insights?Only after batch-run reportingIn real-time
How are problems detected in the system?By extracting information into a spreadsheet and analyzing the data. Payroll administration must run many different reports and spreadsheets in order to detect issues and resolve them.Issues are automatically detected by the validation rules and root cause analysis, which means that the Payroll Admin can focus on solutions.
How long does it take to make corrections in the system?Depending on the number of employees and calculation complexities, between one day and one weekStraight away

In the images below, you can see a comparison of the two types of calculations mentioned in this lesson: Traditional and Continuous Payroll.

The image shows the traditional payroll process. It shows many off cycle payroll runs. In the traditional process these were necessary because of lack of visibility over the complete process. This is changing with the introduction of the continuous payroll process.

This typically meant that organizations needed a large window to process payroll, where they had many activities, which was very stressful. Inevitably, some things needed to be corrected due to the extreme time crunch, leading to the work not being completed after payroll. Instead, organizations had to do a lot of payroll correction runs to fix the things that fell through the cracks. This leads to a poor employee experience, dissatisfaction, and stress for the payroll department.

The image shows the continuous payroll process and lists its benefits. These are improved quality, reduced processing time, and less stress. Continuous payroll will ultimately allow to focus on strategic work in other areas, such as new projects, to cut out manual activities.

With our Continuous payroll, we are changing the game and making it so companies have a higher level of transparency into Payroll at any given time from the 1st day of the month until the day before processing payroll. This will allow organizations to cut it closer to the day payments need to be made, and the actual steps to complete payroll are more of a formality with far less stress and surprises. After payroll is complete, organizations may still process off-cycles, but there will be exceptions, such as a person forgetting to enter their time but needing to get paid.

Overall, this leads to improved quality, reduced processing time, and less stress and will ultimately allow the payroll to focus on strategic work in other areas, such as new projects, to cut out manual activities.

Productive Payroll Process

Productive processes are executed after the monitoring or team monitoring payroll process. The monitoring or team monitoring payroll has been run to detect issues with master data and simulation payroll data as early as possible, so that a productive payroll can be run with the fewest issues or alerts. In addition, in the productive payroll process, authorization is controlled more strictly than the monitoring or team monitoring process. Therefore, team monitoring processes aren't provided in the productive payroll process on purpose.

Productive processes are executed after the monitoring or team monitoring payroll process. The monitoring or team monitoring payroll has been run to detect issues with master data and simulation payroll data as early as possible, so that a productive payroll can be run with the fewest issues or alerts. In addition, in the productive payroll process, authorization is controlled more strictly than the monitoring or team monitoring process. Therefore, team monitoring processes aren't provided in the productive payroll process on purpose.

The following steps are typically part of a productive payroll process:

  • Open payroll: This is to release the payroll control record for the payroll that is all payroll relevant data up to the end of the current payroll period are blocked from changes. There are no such requirements for the Monitoring process, because it is something like the test version. Therefore, this step is not included for the Monitoring process.
  • Generate payroll results. Unlike the Monitoring process, the productive payroll results usually are stored both in the cluster and in declustered tables.
  • Simulate posting.
  • Initiate policies to check employees' master data and payroll data.
  • Assign alerts and monitor the resolution of the alerts. Alerts aren't assigned automatically in the productive payroll process. In the productive payroll process, the payroll process manager must assign alerts manually in Process Management.

After all issues that arose during the Productive Payroll Process have been eliminated, the Payroll Process Manager can confirm this process.

  • Next, the Payroll Process Manager starts the Productive Posting Process and the Bank Transfer Processes for the current month.
  • At the beginning of next month, Payroll Process Manager starts the Monitoring Process for this next month.

Create Favorites

Business Example

To gain a comprehensive knowledge of the Payroll Control Center's capabilities, features, and configuration tools, you will need to consistently perform various tasks that are typically the responsibility of different users. To make accessing transactions and UI5 applications easier, you need to create a few favorite folders and add the necessary objects.

Steps

  1. Create a folder called Configuration tool.

    1. Click on the Favorite in the Menu bar of the SAP Easy Access page and choose Insert Folder Option.

    2. Enter "Configuration tool" in the field Folder name, then click on the green checkmark (Continue (Enter)) in the bottom right corner of the pop-up window.

    3. Add to the folder following UI5 Applications:

      • Select and add the PCC Configuration Workbench transaction (t-code PYC_CONF_WB) to the new favorite folder by dragging and dropping from the User Menu for PCC ## Manager & Admin, where ## - number of your group.
      • Select and add PCC Manage Configuration UI5 Application to the new favorite folder by dragging and dropping.
      For the remaining tasks, repeat steps 1.1–1.3 for other favorite folders, transactions, and UI5 applications from the list.

  2. Create a folder called Payroll Process Manager.

    Add to the folder following UI5 Applications:

    • PCC Manage Policies (Manager)
    • PCC Manage Processes (Manager)
    • PCC My Processes (Manager)
    • PCC My Off Cycles (Manager)

  3. Create a folder called Payroll Administrator.

    Add to the folder the following UI5 Application: PCC My Alerts (Administrator).

  4. Create a folder called Team.

    Add to the folder following UI5 Applications:

    • PCC: Team Management
    • PCC: My Teams (Team Configuration)

  5. Create a folder called PCC Auditor.

    Add to the folder the following UI5 Application: PCC Action/Audit Log UI5 Application.

  6. Create a folder called PCC Administrator.

    Add to the folder transaction: PCC: Admin Transaction Conf. (t-code PYC_ADM_TRANSACTION).

Assign a Personal Number to Your Payroll Area

Business Example

To ensure that each participant can complete subsequent exercises, assigning the personnel number, which will be used later in the exercises, to the designated payroll area is essential.

Steps

  1. Execute transaction PA30Maintain HR Master Data.

  2. Ensure that the personnel number is 722991##, where ## represents your group number assigned to the correct payroll area (X1-X9 for groups 01-09, Y0-Y9 for groups 10-19, Z0-Z9 for groups 20-29, and ZS for group 30) in the Organizational Assignment Infotype. If this is not the case, correct and save the necessary assignment.

    1. Enter 722991##, where ## represents your group number, in the Personal no field.

    2. Enter 0001(Organizational Assignment) in the Infotype field.

    3. Choose Change (Pen icon) in the upper left corner of the transaction toolbar.

    4. Check the payroll area assigned to the personnel number. It is important for further exercises that the employee is assigned the required payroll area. (X1-X9 for groups 01-09, Y0-Y9 for groups 10-19, Z0-Z9 for groups 20-29, and ZS for group 30). Change the assignment if required.

    5. Save the changes.

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