SAP HR Statutory Sick Pay (SSP)

To qualify for Statutory Sick Pay, an employee must:

• be sick for at least 4 or more days in a row - this can include weekends and bank holidays. These 4 days are called the Period of Incapacity for Work.
• earn, before tax and National Insurance, an average of £95.00 a week, i.e. the Lower Earnings Limit for National Insurance Contributions.

An employee’s average weekly earnings for sickness (AWES) is calculated by taking the average gross taxable pay over the 8 week period before the sickness began. This 8 week period is known as the qualifying period and may vary slightly depending on whether you are paid weekly or monthly, or at other intervals.

If you have been sick for two spells or more of at least 4 days in a row with 8 weeks or less between them, they will be counted as one Period of Incapacity for Work, in other words, waiting days will not be served for the second period of sickness.

SSP currently pays £79.15 per week for 28 weeks.

SSP calculations within GBSXP

Using GBSXP, in the standard UK payroll schema, SAP is able to calculate an employee’s entitlement to Statutory Sick Pay based on the above rules.

When calculating a employee’s entitlement to SSP, the first calculation made within GBSXP is to determine the dates of the relevant qualifying period for the employee, based on the dates of the sickness entered in infotype 2001.

SAP then interrogates any payroll results it has previously calculated for the employee that fall within the 8 week qualifying period and specifically looks at the values that have been stored for average bases /212 and /213. By looking at these values, SAP is able to calculate the employee’s average weekly earnings for sickness.

When configuring SAP to correctly calculate the average weekly earnings, each taxable wage type that an employee can receive within the qualifying period must be assigned to either valuation basis /212 or /213. A wage type is assigned to /212 if its value is directly related to an employee’s rate of pay, e.g. Overtime, Basic pay, etc. A wage type is assigned to /213 if it is not directly related to an employee’s rate of pay, e.g. First Aid Allowance, Company Bonus, etc. Each taxable wage type must feed into one of these valuation bases, so when these valuation bases are summed together the result is the total gross taxable pay that an employee received.

By looking at the values held for valuation bases /212 and /213 in the payroll results that fall within the qualifying period, SAP calculates the employee’s AWES and determines whether they are eligible to receive SSP.

Once the AWES has been calculated, GBSXP then calculates how much SSP the employee is entitled to on a daily basis, based on the length of the absence and whether there has previously been another absence of more than 4 days within 8 weeks.

The next step within GBSXP is to add in any Occupational Sick Pay that is due to the employee.

The SSP then needs to be offset against the OSP. SAP makes a decision on how to perform this offset by interrogating feature GOFFS. In this case the OSP is to be minimised, in other words the OSP is to be reduced by the whole amount of SSP.

Here the Paid OSP Deduction for each day is the same as Paid SSP.

At this point, SAP makes the distinction between Paid SSP and Paid SSP (Optional) and this distinction leads to 2 separate wage types being generated, SSPP (Paid SSP) and SSPO (Paid SSP (Optional)).

Paid SSP is generated when there is not enough OSP is to cover the statutory payments due to the employee.

Paid SSP (Optional) is generated when the OSP is already more than the statutory payments due to the employee.

Both these wagetypes, SSPP and SSPO, have been set to print control for payments in evaluation class 2, so they will both appear in the standard payslip. /SPY is a cumulation of these wagetypes and can be used to print on the payslip, alternatively a customer wagetype, 9SSP for example, can be made using a PCR to avoid making unnecessary changes to SAP standard wagetypes.

SSP exceptions

If the absence is too short to qualify for SSP, this warning message will appear when payroll is run for the employee.

If an employee’s Average Weekly Earnings is not enough to qualify for Statutory Sick Pay, this warning will appear when payroll is run for the employee.

HR Support Packs

The Support Packs issued by SAP each February contain the new values for SSP rates. These can be seen in the IMG by following the menu path:

Payroll Payroll: Great Britain Statutory and Occupational Absences Statutory Absence: SSP Display SSP Rates

remember that these values cannot be changed manually

SSP Calculations across Go Live date

When historical absence data is loaded as part of go live, SAP needs to be able to read this data without actually retro’ing back past the go live date, so that it knows whether the employee has exhausted their right to SSP, or if they have had an absence within the 8 week qualifying period.

To enable SAP to do this, transaction PC00_M08_CONV needs to run for every employee who has an absence history. This report fills in table NCALE with the SxP history (it must be run for every statutory absence) for each employee and is used by SAP to calculate any further entitlements. Transaction PC00_M08_CONV also fills NCALE with any occupational entitlements that the employee may have used up from their occupational absence schemes.

SxP Calendar

The SxP calendar, PC00_M08_SxP is a very useful tool when querying why an employee has been paid a certain amount of SxP. The calendar shows how SAP has classified each day that the employee was absent for – e.g. whether it was a waiting day, a non-working day or a paid SSP day.