Types of planning and number formats in Compensation : the case of Hourly employees

Overview

In Compensation (Salary Review) templates of SuccessFactors we can chose between 2 types of planning :

• Option 1 (Periodic planning) : allow planners to enter their recommendations in each employee’s pay frequency (monthly/semi-monthly/hourly, etc..) in which case for an hourly employee making $44.5/hour the planner will see $44.5 in the “Current Salary” column of the worksheet and if the planner enters a 3.5% increase the calculated $ amount in the “Merit” column will also be in the employee’s pay frequency – here hourly as $1.56 (44.5*3.5%). Please note : in this setup, guidelines will always be divided by the value retrieved in the Units Per Year standard field.
  • In this type of planning, a different format can be applied based on the pay frequency or the currency of each employee. For example in the same worksheet a semi-monthly employee can be planned without decimals (even if the pay component in EC has decimals) but an hourly employee can be planned (and published back to EC) with decimals.
  • To apply the different format based on the pay frequency in this type of planning, we need to navigate to “Set Number Format Rules” in our template and configure the following new custom Money format (and apply it to any Money custom column. Standard columns will pick it up automatically) :
• Option 2 (Annualized Planning): allow planners to enter their recommendations in annualized values for all employees in which case for an hourly employee making $44.5/hour the planner will see $92,560 (44.5*2,080) in the “Current Salary” column of the worksheet and if the planner enters a 3.5% increase the calculated $ amount in the “Merit” column will be also be annualized as $3,239.6 (92,560*3.5%).
  • In this type of planning, a different format CANNOT be applied based on the pay frequency or the currency. Only one Money format and one Amount format can be set for the whole template for all employees.

Please watch the video below for additional explanations on how to configure Option 1 and Option 2 above : 

Problem

In this post, we will look at the following requirement : have all employees (including hourly employees) planned in Annualized values without decimals but allow the new/reviewed pay rate of hourly employees (and only them) to be published back to EC with two decimals.

The problem in this case is that in order for all employees to be planned without decimals we must set the one and only Money format for our template in “Set Number Format Rules” to never show decimals as per the screenshot below :

This leads to issues when publishing back the reviewed pay rate for hourly employees with 2 decimals since the value published back can only be stored in Money format or Amount format columns.

Solution

Here we have no other choice but to walk on a fine line between the Money and Amount columns formats.

We need to keep the Money format from the above screenshot (no decimals) but configure all columns of our publish back section in Amount format and set that format to be #,##0.## which means it will display 2 decimals when found.

Then we need to configure the publish back columns of our template the following way (and use a Round(‘halfUp’,…) formula in the Final PayRate to Publish) – click to zoom in :

Conclusion

Once we have successfully created our Publish back section columns as per the above screenshot, all we need to do is make sure the column “Final PayRate to Publish” is correctly added to our publish back xml code section (this step can still only be done in the xml of the template) :

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APPENDIX:

Option 1 : Periodic Planning (also called User Rate Planning)

• This option is configured by not defining any EC mapping for the standard columns “curSalary”, “localCurrencyCode”, “salaryType” and “unitsPerYear”. By doing that the worksheet will automatically retrieve (if data migration was done correctly) for each employee the value of the Pay Component flagged (in Admin Center > “Manage Organization, Pay and Job Structure”) as “Use for = Compensation” that is stored in their compensation portlet.
• To publish back to EC we then need to map the standard column “finSalary” column to the xml publish back code snippet.

Option 2 (Model Company approach) : Annualized Planning

• This option allows more flexibility to capture an employee’s base amount for merit increase (it may differ by country) through the use of Pay Component Groups in Employee Central. To configure option 2, all we need to do is map the standard columns “curSalary”, “localCurrencyCode”, “salaryType” and “unitsPerYear” to the Pay Component Group calculating the Annualized Salary for all employees in Employee Central.
• To publish back to EC we need to add 2 money or amount type columns to our publish back design section :
  • A first one called “Current Pay Rate” where we retrieve the current pay rate of the employee from EC (= the value of the pay component flagged as “Use for = Compensation” in each employee’s compensation portlet in EC) : this is done by setting to EC Mapping for the column to “EC Category = Compensation” and leaving the 2 other dropdown lists blank.
  • A second column called “Final PayRate to Publish” with the following formula : “finSalary/(curSalary/currentPayRate)”.
  • Finally map the “Amount to publish back” column to the xml publish back code snippet.