SAP HR Multiple (Concurrent) Employments

Overview

Multiple Employments, or as they are otherwise also known Concurrent Employments, can often be a bit of an Achilles heel for organisations with SAP. There are some basic facts which have been put forward in this page. In addition there are some tips and tricks which you will find interesting and should make sure that if you want a clean SAP system, users adhere to these basics.

The role of the Central Person object

There is an object in SAP called the Central Person (object CP) which is used in Multiple Employments. This object is created as soon as you link two employments together via the infotype 0031.

Infotype 0031 – Reference Personnel Numbers

The first thing you will notice with this infotype is that the start and end dates are greyed out. SAP pre-populates these with a very early start date and uses the “high date” for the end date. There will only ever be one infotype record for an employee with multiple employments.

The other thing you will notice is that there is only one field usually showing on the infotype which is for the linked employee numbers.

After entering the employee numbers for the other linked employments (contracts), SAP gives you a message to let you know the name of each entered employee number and the fact that a reference to employee number nnnnnnnn has been created.

After saving your entries, SAP will tell you that certain wagetypes will be copied between the employments.

If any of the new employees already have payroll results in the system, you will be told that certain infotypes e.g. infotype 0009 bank details, infotype 0065 tax details, cannot be copied. This is due to the employees having a date value in the accounted to field on infotype 0003 (payroll status).

You need to make sure that the tax details are correct on all employments before you process the employees through payroll. If the employees are linked they should have the same tax codes for the linked employments. This will prevent them from getting more than one tax allowance.

Typically the infotypes that will be copied are:

Infotype 0001 – Organisation Assignment
Infotype 0002 – Personal Details
Infotype 0003 – Payroll Status and other statutory infotypes relating to tax, social security, national insurance etc.

Infotype 0121 – Reference Personnel Number Priority

This infotype is without doubt the most important infotype for Multiple Employments from a SAP point of view. If a user makes a mistake on this infotype, the employees could get processed through payroll incorrectly and it can be a real pain to try and correct the data and the payroll results.

You don’t have to have the highest paying post as the main employment. SAP will still correctly calculate the payroll for both employments. Most users will generally make sure that the highest earning post is in fact down as the primary employment.

The trick is to make sure that you don’t keep switching the priority for an employee. SAP should recalculate the correct payroll results, but it is safer to leave the priority as it is, rather than changing it.

It is important that you minimise the changes that have to be made to this infotype for a set of contracts for an employee. The fewer changes you make, the less likely you are going to get this employee’s data in a muddle.

The dates on infotype 121 are crucial. SAP will generally ensure that this infotype is delimited to reflect the changes to the employee’s other contracts. If an employee has a number of multiple contracts (we have seen them go into double figures) then there could be a number of instances of this infotype with different sets of data on it.

The key is to ensure that the dates accurately reflect the situation and that the order is not changed.

Personnel Number Sequence

If you are starting a new implementation then try and have your secondary employment number lower than your primary because SAP payroll processes the lower number first. If you don’t have them this way around, it is not a problem, but you will end up with more employees to process in your matchcode W payroll run.

Employees going out of Sync - Updates done in the Background

SAP keeps certain infotypes in sync with one another. This ensures that the different employees share the same data for certain areas. In other areas, the infotypes are copied with the assistance of dynamic actions. This usually works fine for data entered in the foreground during updates done by users undertaking their normal work. Any changes to one of the employment’s payroll control record (infotype 0003) will then be copied across to the same infotype for the other employments linked to the employee.

This isn’t the case for updates done in the background. This could be for master data updates done via an interface program or BDC session or perhaps a LSMW upload. Check to see whether the values on the payroll status infotype are indeed being updated.

Payroll Simulation for Multiples – future periods where payroll results don’t yet exist

Remember that if you try and run a payroll simulation for a period in which the payroll results don’t yet exist you need to bear the following in mind. You can run a payroll simulation for all the secondary employments, but you will not be able to run the primary employment successfully, as no payroll results exist for the secondary and this will result in an error message.

Linking Multiple Employees in different payroll areas

You should avoid at all costs trying to link employees who are in different payroll areas which have different period modifiers. Linking a weekly to a monthly or lunar for example is not feasible and will cause inaccurate payroll results. You can, however, link 2 employees if they are on different payroll areas but have the same period modifier.

Infotype 0031 – can’t be viewed in SE16

You will notice that you are unable to find the table for PA0031 if you are using SE16 or SE16N. This is because the data held on this infotype is held in a structure rather than a direct table as is the case with most of the other infotypes.

Multiple Messages on the Payslip

If you are using infotype 0128 (notifications) and have configured your payslips to ensure that you only print out 1 payslip per person (i.e. all the employments results get amalgamated onto a single payslip) you need to be aware that any messages will be added individually to the payslip. This means that you could end up with 4 messages if a person has 4 employment contracts. The trick is to ensure that you only create a message for one of the employments.

Sharing address details across different employments

Users should be aware that whilst the home addresses for the employee will be the same for employees with different contracts, the work addresses may be different.