SAP HCM Benefits FSA Record Dates for Open Enrollment

I recently had a client come to me for help regarding an issue with FSA dates on Infotype 170 when they were doing their benefits open enrollment testing. The issue was that they wanted their FSA plans to be based upon the calendar year even though their other plans are not based upon the calendar year.

Here is a little bit of background on my client

• SAP ERP 6.0 EHP 6 (Upgrading to EHP7)
• Handles all Benefits through SAP
• ESS via NWBC (ABAP WebDynpro Application)
• Plan Effective Date = 12/15/2014
• Open Enrollment Period = 11/24/2014-12/05/2014
• SAP Gross to Net Payroll
• Mostly standard SAP implementation
• Expected Results for FSA Plan – 01/01/2015-12/31/2015

Currently, when they were testing, the FSA entries were being created per the configuration on V_5UB3_1 for the administrative parameters (Screenshot below). I tested this in both ESS as well as HRBEN0001 and found that the issue was occurring in both places which lead me to believe that it was being pulled from configuration although I was not 100% sure.

When I logged into ESS, I saw the following under the FSA portion of the guided activity floor plan:

When I saved the record and looked at the Infotype 170 record created behind the scenes via PA20 I saw the following for the entry:

My first question to the client was whether this was working previously and it turned out that it was NOT working previously. They had the same issue last year and they MANUALLY fixed it. This meant their benefits team going into PA30 and updating over 1,000 records manually! Ouch!!

In the past clients where I had worked on ESS Benefits Open enrollment I had not really paid too much attention to the FSA dates because the business never called it out or submitted it as an issue, but it was quite the big deal here. So I looked through the IMG, did a little bit of research (Google) and did not have much luck in my initial research. Ultimately, I searched OSS and found SAP Note 989966. This was an older note (2007) which has the following description

“Currently, in the standard system, when FSA plan enrollment occurs either via Employee Self-Service (ESS) or from the Enrollment Workbench, the validity of the FSA plan is automatically derived from the administrative parameters of the benefit area. However, in accordance with the law, employees may only be enrolled in an FSA plan during the current year”.

So this confirmed my suspicion that the dates were coming from the administrative parameters table. In this note which was released in 2007 SAP gave us an option to adjust the dates for these plans only (Spending Accounts) and not all of the other ones (There are notes for the different types of plans where you can do the same thing as I am doing here and I have mentioned them below). It requires using a BADI in order to adjust the dates passed to the screens and then ultimately to the Infotypes. I went to transaction SE18 and created the BADI Implementation for PBEN0038 per the instructions on the note.

I wrote some very simple code to pass the date logic (I do not do much programming although I debug code quite often) and activated the BADI. The BADI is called from within standard FM  HR_BEN_GET_SPENDA_OFFER in case anyone is interested. Here is a screenshot of my code (I know there are probably 100 other ways to write this with the same results, including some standard SAP function modules).

Once I activated the BADI and I tested, I saw that the dates looked good in both ESS & HRBEN0001! Here is what it looked like on ESS

I saved the records via ESS and then went to PA20 and the Infotype also looked correct –> using 01/01/2015 & 12/31/2015 dates as expected!

In case anyone was interested in some of the other customer exits for adjusting the dates outside of PBEN0038 here is the information for them.

• PBEN0039 – Set dates for Miscellaneous plans
  • Implemented by SAP in OSS Note 1030384
  • Called from Function Module HR_BEN_GET_MISCEL_OFFER
• PBEN0040 – Set dates for HSA plans
  • Implemented by SAP in OSS Note 1052279
    
  • Called from Function Module HR_BEN_GET_SAVINGS_OFFER

I just wanted to share this experience in case anyone else has to deal with anything similar. Overall, my research and implementation of this simple solution saved the client a lot of headache and manual labor (Although if I did not figure it out then I would have recommended a Program/BDC/LSMW instead of having their benefits team manually doing this!!