Time & Attendance software Integration with Employee Central Payroll

Introduction

This article focuses on Time & Attendance software (Kronos/Workforce/Third-party application) integration with SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll or on-premise payroll.

Given the significance in recent times to track employee working time accurately, a lot of companies in Australia & globally are focused on adapting T&A software and integrating it with payroll systems. The majority of the companies are choosing Kronos and Workforce software, given the flexibility in interfacing the data to the SAP Payroll system.

Apparently, let’s analyze some of the recommendations and best practices in connecting the T&A system with SAP Payroll.

Considering the market strategy for the cloud, this article focuses on connecting the T&A system to Employee Central/Employee Central Payroll. However, for organizations that still host their payroll system in SAP on-premise, you can leverage the same set of objects described below to connect T&A and Payroll systems.

Employee Master integration from EC to T&A

Employee Central is the source of master data in the cloud landscape architecture, so the data/employee profiles are created in the T&A system from Employee Central.

The widely accepted format for T&A inbound interface is CSV

A point to note – T&A system which requires identifying policy profiles of employees, can be created as custom fields in job info (potentially hiding for employee’s view). Only Admin is responsible to maintain the profiles based on the award structure.

Payroll Export Integration from T&A system to Employee Central Payroll

The seamless integration from the T&A system to the Payroll system is achieved by enabling the web services.

Almost all T&A software available in the market has pay export files generated in CSV format, however, the web service inbound to payroll system should require the file format in XML to feed the data.

Please find the below architecture describing the connectivity

The employee working hours from T&A through time pay export will be received in standard database tables PTEX2000, PTEX2010, etc. These are the same tables used in the CATS interface from Netweaver Portal to SAP ECC.

In this case, employee working times are hosted in the T&A system, so IT0007 in SAP would contain a dummy work schedule (Similar to the landscape where Planned Working Time Replication is activated – If you are keen to learn PWT replication, please refer to this blog here). The planned/actual working hours are referenced from IT2010.

Middleware recommendation – You can use either Boomi/CPI, both provide greater flexibility for XML file format interface through web service.

Overall architecture

Conclusion

To recapitulate, Time and Attendance systems are flexibly connected via middleware through webservices by leveraging standard tables (PTEX****) in SAP. Also, please make sure the frequency of time pay export is defined once in every pay period to address the best outcomes.

If you’d like to learn more about the connectivity of KR (WFD) to Successfactors, please refer Kronos Integration Overview

Thank you for reading, Looking forward to your feedback and questions in the comments section.