Printing Pay checks directly to customer printer from Employee Central Payroll Systems

At this point, most of us know that the SAP EC Payroll systems are basically just an ABAP based system hosted in one of SAP’s data centers, and as you migrate from your on-premise system to the hosted EC Payroll system, there are some changes in how we are used to do things from the time we had all of our systems on-premise.

One of these changes involve printing payroll checks to on-premise printers, from a system hosted in an SAP Data Center.

This is an overview to assist in how to configure your EC Payroll system to print directly to a printer defined in the EC Payroll system, in transaction code SPAD. This is printing through SAPRouter.

PREREQUISITES

• Access to the EC Payroll system via SAP GUI
  • The VPN Tunnel is configured as described in this guide
  • Print Servers configured at client location – On Premise
  • Access to network administrators for firewall configuration
  • Read SAP Note https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2079726

AUDIENCE

• SAP Technical / Basis
• Payroll Consultants
• Network and Print Server Administrators

OVERVIEW

The pay check is generated in the EC Payroll system, and the payroll processor will, after the payment programs have run, specify a printer in the SAP ECP System to where the checks should be printed.

Once the configuration is completed as outlined in the next section, the data will flow as follows:

EC Payroll Instance –> SAP Data Center’s SAPRouter –> Customer SAPRouter –> Customer Print Server –> Paycheck Printer

See Diagram below:

CONFIGURATION

After you read SAP Note 2079726 you should be familiar with the high level steps, and how the communication works between the hosted SAP System, and the on-premise printer.

The Basis, Network Administrators, and Print Server Administrators will have to work together to make this configuration work.

1. Get the IP addresses, or hostname information from the Network and Printer Server Team
2. Create a printer definition in the EC Payroll System
3. Test the connection
4. Print a test page

Get the IP addresses, or hostname information from the Network and Printer Server Team

The printer definition configured in the SAP System will be such that the printer prints through the SAP Routers, and therefore we need to build an SAP Router string, we will require all of the IP Addresses for the communication routes.

The format of the Printer router string is below:

/H/<sapcloud_saprouter>/S/299/<customer_saprouter>/S/299/H/<printerserver_address>/S/<printer_port_on_print_server>

i.e. /H/169.145.9.91/S/3299/207.1.2.3/S/3299/H/206.6.213.17/S/5151    (Please note these are not actual IP Addresses, except for the first IP address which is SAP’s Data Canter SAPRouter 169.145.9.91)

Therefore the most important part of this is for the network/firewall team to work with the print server team to ensure they provide the correct IP Addresses and ports for the printers, in order for us to build the SAPRouter string.

Create a printer definition in the EC Payroll System (BASIS)

Using transaction code SPAD, create a new output device in EC Payroll:

DEVICE ATTRIBUTES

ACCESS METHOD

You can keep the Output Attributes and Tray Info settings to default.

Save your entries.

Test the Connection

It is now time to test your connection by using the Test Connection button 

If you are successful, you will see a message as seen below:

Print a test page

Now you can provide the printer name to your Payroll team, and the payroll team should test if they can print a “dummy” check on the check printer to ensure the signatures, MICR fonts, and other check printing objects print correctly.