One of the areas that I have gotten a lot of questions on, heard a lot of excitement on, and

seen a good amount of confusion on is around Employee Central Payroll. This is certainly a
hot topic with a lot of intrigue and mystery in the SAP HCM & SuccessFactors space. I have
run across many SAP Payroll consultants who have previously resisted moving into and
working with Employee Central but who are now at least getting interested in late 2015/
Early 2016 as Employee Central continues to grow. Here are some of the
questions/comments that I have gotten that inspired me to write this blog post to clear some
misconceptions and show the process of running payroll using Employee Central Payroll and
how it really is an integrated experience..

1. What do the screens and integration look like with Employee Central?

1. Is it an SSO page in Employee Central that takes you into SAP so you can run
your processes such as RPCALC* or is it truly integrated?

2. Does Employee Central Payroll still use the same configuration as on premise Payroll
using the IMG and a payroll schema?

3. For US Payroll is there still a connection to BSI?

4. Are the new Payroll Screens only for Employee Central customers or can existing
customers live with SAP on premise Payroll also implement these screens?

5. Can you show me the screens and process?

First and foremost, we do need to understand that Employee Central is the system of record
and that the data will be maintained by Employee's, Manager's, and Administrator's in
Employee Central. The data that is updated in Employee Central is then replicated over to the
Employee Central Payroll system via point to point integration.

For the purposes of this blog post I am going to focus on the Payroll Manager, or the person processing the
Payroll and not go into the Payroll Administrator role or the people correcting data issues.

Let's start by take a look at the screens of Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll to
provide a little more transparency to begin answering the questions above.

To begin the process of running payroll, the person responsible for running payroll (Payroll
Manager role) would log into their SuccessFactors Employee Central instance and based
upon having the correct role based authorization they would have a tile for "Payroll Process"
once they login to the home page. This tile tells you the number of current, upcoming, and
completed payroll processes. It would look similar to Screenshot 1 below.

Screenshot 1 - Employee Central Home Page

Once you are ready to run payroll you would click the SuccessFactors drop down and then
select Payroll as highlighted in Screenshot 2.
Screenshot 2 - Employee Central drop down showing Payroll button

Once you click the Payroll button that takes you to the "Payroll Control Center" or the
"Payroll Cockpit" as shown in Screenshot 3. Depending upon your role you would now see
the screens where you can run payroll (Payroll Manager role) entitled "Payroll Process" and
where you can resolve issues associated with a payroll process (Payroll Admin role) entitled
"Payroll Errors"/"Payroll Team Errors". In my example and screenshot both roles are
assigned to my user although this may not necessarily be the case. Pay attention to the
seamless integration with Employee Central and notice how we can easily jump right back
into any of the other implemented modules in our SuccessFactors instance.

To clear up a common misconception, these screens are SAPUI5 programs that were
delivered with HR Renewal 2.0. The screenshot below is a screen for the Payroll Manager or
person running the payroll that was delivered in HR Renewal 2.0 Feature Pack
3 (hrpy_pcc_proc_2). The newer Feature pack 3 screens are the screens that I will show for
the purposes of this blog post although I will point out that there was an earlier version of the
screen to run payroll.

Starting with EA-HRRXX 608 SP012, the payroll control center introduces a new payroll
experience for the payroll process manager. One cool piece of functionality that SAP
delivered in Feature Pack 3 that I want to point out here is the following: "In order to correct
the last payroll errors centrally, specific selected users are now able to change employee’s
data, even if the control record has status “released for payroll” or “check results”". So if
you pay attention to the steps in this post further below you will notice that there is no step to
change the control record to a "released for correction" status to fix employee data due to the
fact that we can correct the data without changing the control record as part of this change.

So to address one of the questions from earlier - you can use these same screens that I will
discuss here for existing on-premise SAP Payroll if you implement the HR Renewal 2.0
functionality with the key difference being that you would access the Payroll Control Center
from ESS via the HR Renewal Landing page or the Fiori Launchpad instead of via the
seamless integration to SuccessFactors as I am showing and talking about in this post.