SAP HR Work Schedules: Tips and Tricks

Purpose and Use

Every employee must have a Work Schedule defined in their Master Data if they are to be paid correctly. Work Schedules are recorded on infotype 0007 (Planned Working Time). When payroll is run, these data are read in using function P0007, and the various rules and schemas calculate how much basic pay an employee should receive in relation to the hours they have worked.

Creating

Public Holiday Calendar

The public holiday calendar on which work schedules are to be based, needs to be generated to at least one month later.

Daily Work Schedule

It is necessary to create separate Daily Work Schedules for each day having a different number of working hours. However, it is not necessary to create a new 4 hour (for example) daily work schedule every time, since the original one can be used any number of times. There should be no duplication of identical daily work schedules. It may, however, be that there are more than one defined for (e.g.) 4 hours if these hours are different each time (e.g. 9:00 to 13:00pm; 10:30 to 14:30; 19:15 to 23:15)

When defining daily working time for partial hours (e.g. 4.5 hours, 5.9 hours, 2.1 hours) it must be remembered when defining the actual times worked that this equates to:

4.5 hours = 4.5 * 60 mins (e.g. 9:00 to 13:30)
5.9 hours = 5.9 * 60 mins (e.g. 9.00 to 14:54)
2.1 hours = 2.1 * 60 mins (e.g. 9.00 to 11.06)

For simplicity, naming conventions showing, where possible, the number of hours worked are used (e.g. 0802 GB 2 hours [08 being the molga for GB]). This allows for quick checking of whether a particular daily work schedule has already been created since they are listed in numerical order, and when allocating daily work schedules to the period work schedule.

It is also possible at this stage to define specific break periods within a working day in order to be able to calculate when an unpaid lunch break (e.g.) is to be taken.

Period Work Schedule (PWS)

As noted above, a PWS must run for a minimum of 7 days (day 01 always being Monday), but may run for any multiple thereof, i.e. it may be a two or three week period.

Any PWS's that do cover more than one week are appropriately labelled in the table when created.

Work Schedule Rule

With the individual week(s) now defined, it is now necessary to enter the information relating to monthly, weekly and annual working hours as well as the number of days worked per week and, most important the Reference Date and Start Point for the PWS.

Due to the nature of employees' planned working time, the numbers entered for daily (and perhaps weekly) working hours, and weekly work days, can either be exact or averages.

In other words, if the Work Schedule details a different number of hours to be worked each day, then:

Daily Working Hours = (Total Weekly Working Hours/Total Weekly Work Days)

and similar if the weekly working hours differ.

To determine how the period is mapped to the whole year, two pieces of information are required:

1. The Reference Date for PWS
2. The Start Point in PWS

The Reference Date for PWS can be any date between 01.01.1800 and high date (31.12.9999). For simplicity, it is easiest to take the date from which the Work Schedule is to be valid. This, generally, makes it easier to work out the Start Point in PWS.

Example: a two week PWS, with every first Friday as an off day, is to be valid from 01.September.2007. Since the 1st September 2007 is a Saturday, this would be entered as:

Ref. Date for PWS: 01.09.2007 (assuming user parameter date setting of DD.MM.YYYY)
Start Point in PWS: 013 (this is a 3 digit field)

The reason that 013 is the start point and not 006, is down to the fact that in order to have the first Friday (i.e. Friday 7th September 2007) as the day off (and therefore start at the beginning of the two week PWS, the previous Saturday must be the Saturday in the second week –day 13.

Generation of Work Schedules

This must be done for a period which is less than that for which the Holiday Calendar is valid.

It is best to generate one or two months manually initially in order to check that the Reference date and Start point have been calculated correctly and that all Daily WS have been entered correctly.

The inclusion of this session in the transport can be checked be checking the log via transaction SE01. Under the entry "Table Contents > T552A" expanding this will show the list of months processed in the batch session.

Period Work Schedule Valuation

The final stage of creating a Work Schedule is to enter a period for which the Period WS created is to be valid. This is normally up to high date.

If this is not done, payroll will fail for those employees who have been allocated to this work schedule. An error message will be displayed, the valuation entry must be made, and payroll rerun.