Refinement of Absences
Use
Many regulations in collective agreements, laws, or company agreements make provisions for staggered payment of absence times. This includes, for example, regulations whereby absence times are paid at a lower rate or are unpaid after a set number of absence days or hours. The regulations are often dependent on employees’ age or seniority.
In these cases, it is not sufficient to valuate the several-day, whole-day, or partial-day absence records in the Absences infotype (2001). On a particular day, there may be a change in payment in the middle of the day or within a partial-day absence. To map such situations, you have to be able to consider the absence records day by day and also to split them into partial-day absences. To do so, you can use the XNAB function in the time data processing part of Payroll.
The XNAB function complements the functions for valuating absences. You can use it to split all absences that are not deducted from a quota and to valuate them according to your requirements.
In the case of absences that are deducted from a quota, you can assign your own absence valuation rule according to the quota from which they are deducted. For more information, see the Implementation Guide for Payroll for your country and choose: Absences -> Valuation of Absences with Quota Deduction.
Integration
The XNAB function is an international function. It may be that other functions and Customizing activities have been developed for your country to cover the country’s specific requirements. If this is the case, you do not need to use the XNAB function. Check in the Implementation Guide for your country whether you can use country-specific developments instead.
Prerequisites
· You store your employees’ absence times in the Absences infotype (2001).
· The international XNAB function has to cover the business requirements of a large number of countries. These different, complex regulations cannot be represented using generic Customizing tables. You therefore have access to a number of country-specific function modules, an SAP enhancement, and a BAdI to specify the processing of the XNAB function.
Find out first which, if any, country-specific function modules have been configured for you. If you want to use the SAP enhancement or the BAdI, you should have advanced knowledge of ABAP or ABAP OO.
For more information on the interfaces, see the documentation on the XNAB function.
The system runs through the various function modules as follows:
· It first processes the country-specific function modules.
· In a second step, it runs through the customer-specific source code in the SAP enhancement or BAdI.
Features
You can use the XNAB function in the time data processing part of Payroll to assign markers to absence times according to particular customer- and country-specific criteria to store business situations with the absence. You can store markers for each day and absence. A 100-character marker field is available in each case.
You want absences to have different markers if
- An illness lasts more than five days
- The employee suffered a work incapacity of more than 20 days in the last year
- The end of the sick pay period has been reached
The markers do not necessarily need to lead to a different valuation, that is, cause the absence to be split. You can also set markers for statistical purposes, for example. You can store several markers for each day of absence. You can also switch markers several times each day for partial-day absences. You may need to do so if, for example, regulations stipulate a number of hours and therefore the marker must be changed in the middle of a day.
The system creates a new entry in the internal COVERAGE HISTORY table for each day for which a marker is created and for each marker in a day. For each entry, the system uses the source code from the country-specific function module HR_COV_DETERMINE_MARK_xx or your source code from the SAP enhancement to determine the proportion to which the relevant hours is to be assigned to one marker or the other.
All markers that are to lead to a different valuation of an absence can lead to the absence being split via the function. The XNAB function can then assign separate absence valuation rules to each of these splits.
You can use the SAP enhancement, the BAdI, or country-specific processing to influence the marking and splitting steps.
To ensure a correct and comprehensible result, the two steps should always produce the same proportions for the markers and splits, insofar as the change in marker is relevant for payment. For more information, see the documentation on the XNAB function.
Grouping employees
You can use the COVER feature (Determine Rule Group for Refinement of Absences) to group employees who are to be handled in the same way for the refinement of absences. To do so, you create rule groups for the refinement of absences based on organizational assignments or absence types.
You want salaried employees, hourly-wage earners, and temporary personnel to be handled differently.
You want absences of employees who are absent frequently to be remunerated less favorably.
Creating rules for the refinement of absences
There can be different bases for the valuation of absences depending on an employee’s age or seniority.
Employees who have been with your company longer receive a longer period of sick pay.
You can therefore define in Customizing rules for each rule group for the refinement of absences in which you specify the regulations that apply for the different age or seniority intervals. This means that, for each interval, you can mark and split absences according to different criteria. For more information, see the Implementation Guide: choose Payroll xx -> Gross -> Absences -> Create Rule Group for Absence Refinement.
You use your customer-specific SAP enhancement to define the meaning of the rules’ content The meaning of the content has to be defined by the position and nature of the individual markers.
Selecting absences
You may not want to refine all absences in all situations, instead only those that affect employees’ incapacity to work, for example.
You can there specify exactly which absences you want to be excluded from processing. For more information, see the Implementation Guide: choose Payroll xx -> Gross -> Absences -> Define Absences for Refinement.
Excluding particular payroll runs from processing
You may not want to mark or split absences in particular payroll runs, for example, off-cycle payroll. You can therefore set up regulations in which you exclude individual absences from processing according to the off-cycle reason, for example. The country-specific function module HR_COV_CHECK_AB_xx and the HRTIM_COV_HISTORY BAdI (Customer Enhancements for Payroll Function XNAB) are available for this purpose.
Saving markers
At the end of the payroll run, the system stores the entries from the Coverage History internal table in the COVER table on cluster PC.
You can check the results in the payroll log and using the RPCLSTPC report (Display Cluster PC: Personal Calendar).
Preparing the production startup
To analyze absences and assign them a particular valuation, the system must, in most cases, analyze past absence times. This means that entries for past periods must also be available in the COVER table on the PC cluster.
You can use the PTBCH00 report (Initialization of COVER Table for Absence Refinement) to fill the COVER table with data records from the past for the first use of the XNAB function. The report executes all XNAB functions so that you do not have to perform a retroactive accounting run for payroll.
You use the COVGL feature to specify dates for the production startup of the XNAB function according to organizational assignments, for example. These dates determine the date as of which you want to further refine and valuate absences in Payroll.
For more information, see the documentation for the RPTBCH00 report, and the Implementation Guide for Payroll for your country: <Gross> -> Absences -> Absence Valuation -> Refinement of Absences -> Prepare Production Startup for the Refinement of Absences.