Following up on my previous post ‘From Y2K to Cloud: My journey with SAP Payroll transformation’, I want to share another crucial lesson from my first SAP Payroll implementation: the challenge of overcoming the dreaded phrase, "but we've always done it this way." Early in my career, I found myself in a small conference room with a handful of IT colleagues, selected to implement SAP Payroll for about 5,000 employees. Our boss Carol went around the room, pointing at each of us and assigning our areas of expertise. She stopped at me and declared: "Reporting."
Following up on my previous post ‘From Y2K to Cloud: My journey with SAP Payroll transformation’, I want to share another crucial lesson from my first SAP Payroll implementation: the challenge of overcoming the dreaded phrase, "but we've always done it this way."
Early in my career, I found myself in a small conference room with a handful of IT colleagues, selected to implement SAP Payroll for about 5,000 employees. Our boss Carol went around the room, pointing at each of us and assigning our areas of expertise. She stopped at me and declared: "Reporting."
Just like that, I was whisked off to in-person SAP training to become our reporting specialist.
Back in the late 1990s, training meant sitting in physical classrooms at various locations around the world. For me, these were classrooms in Georgia and Texas. The topic of reporting back then translated to learning ABAP programming. I became an ABAP programmer, as detailed in my earlier blog “SAP HCM Reporting: Are Query tools ancient history?”
Armed with my new skills, I returned to the project team with what I thought was the right question: "What reports do you need?"
What Payroll reports do you need?
What happened next taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my career.
The Payroll department handed me their priority list, and I eagerly tackled their first request: a comprehensive employee listing sorted by last name, first name, with full Social Security Numbers. Being young and inexperienced, I didn't question the purpose; I just dived right into coding. I wrote the ABAP report (which, ironically, took less time than figuring out how to connect the SAP terminal to the printer) and proudly delivered my work.
Only then did I ask the critical question I should have asked from the start: "What do you use this report for?"
The answer was enlightening: In their old DOS system, they could only look up employees by Social Security Number (SSN), so they printed this complete listing daily as a reference guide. Here's the kicker: in SAP, even back then, you could look up employees using various criteria, no SSN required. I had just spent time and resources (and yes, quite a few trees) creating a report that the new system made completely obsolete.
The real purpose of reporting
After 20+ years focusing on reporting, I've learned that the key isn't to replicate what was done before; it's to understand the company's goals and KPIs and what data will drive that measurement. The first question shouldn't be "What reports do you need?" but rather "What business decisions do you need to make, and what data will help you make them?"
Best practices in Payroll reporting
Working at one of the leading global SAP SuccessFactors HCM consulting companies, I've seen how critical proper reporting is for successful payroll deployments. Through our work with numerous global clients including Amey, the BBC, De Lijn and Specsavers, we've identified standard best-practice payroll reports that every organization needs for calculating, balancing, and reconciling payroll.
We're now making 25 of these essential reports available to any client using SAP ECC On-premises Payroll or SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll through our Payroll Pack offering. While we're well-known for Query Manager – our SAP S/4HANA certified live reporting solution for Payroll – we recognize that some clients simply want ready-to-use, best-practice reports delivered to them.
The set includes invaluable reports which solve your existing payroll challenges. Reports include:
- Payroll Gross to Net Reporting
- Payroll Variance Reporting
- Personnel Administration Audit Logs
- Employee Payroll Postings
- Master data checks, including missing and duplicate bank details and missing addresses
Want to see which reports are included in the Payroll Pack? Download the list of reports included in the Payroll Pack.
Stay tuned for my next blog post, where I'll discuss how to design your new Payroll system to ensure your data can be effectively analyzed from multiple angles – a principle that applies whether you're implementing HCM, Finance, Supply Chain, or any other system.
