How does SAP Payroll Control Center improve efficiency?

The SAP SuccessFactors payroll front end can vastly improve efficiency and accuracy. It can also save time -- and your sanity -- by eliminating crunch-time surprises. Here's how.

Luke Marson

Published: 31 Jan 2018

SAP Payroll Control Center is the front end for SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll and is used by payroll...

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departments, payroll managers and others involved in payroll processing. Payroll Control Center can also be used as an add-on for SAP ERP Payroll.

Payroll professionals can manage, control, validate and run payroll from inside SAP SuccessFactors in an easy-to-use interface. The software is a one-stop shop for running the end-to-end payroll process, including releasing the payroll data, triggering the payroll run, posting the simulation, running checks and exiting the payroll. It also enables you to run post-payroll processes, such as posting payroll results to the general ledger, and offers a standard audit report that allows you to keep track of who does what in SAP Payroll Control Center (PCC).

Processes are simpler in Payroll Control Center than they are in Employee Central Payroll, which improves efficiency in executing payroll. But the software provides a number of other functionalities to make payroll more efficient.

1. User interface

The SAP Payroll Control Center UI enables easier, quicker and smoother payroll operations than the Employee Central Payroll back-end UI. Payroll is also easier to run and monitor. You can control the process by adding tiles for various PCC transactions and processes to the SuccessFactors homepage.

The PCC homepage makes it easy to navigate to different activities and actions. This homepage is similar to the SuccessFactors homepage.

2. Pre-payroll

One of the biggest advantages of PCC is the ability to monitor your payroll and see exactly what the results will look like prior to starting production payroll, without surprises. If you are using the non-PCC back-end system to process payroll, the only thing you can do before running payroll is run a simulation and master data audits. A simulation only identifies the employees who "error out" because their records are missing necessary payroll data.

With PCC, you can create alerts to identify missing data, such as cost center, policy deviations (e.g., employees who have a 20% deviation in pay between periods) and data anomalies, like payroll claims. You can create an alert for nearly any scenario.

Let's look at an example. If you're running a monthly payroll on the 25th of the month, then PCC gives you a process for the first 24 days of the month, whereby the payroll team can monitor the payroll and identify and act on data discrepancies before running payroll. The aim is to move most of the payroll effort to a pre-payroll activity instead of scrambling during or after payroll processing when there is very little time. Not only does this make the process more efficient and provide clear validation, it significantly reduces the likelihood of errors.

As you monitor payroll before running it, you will receive specific payroll alerts to notify you of policy deviations or payroll errors so they can be looked into and corrected quickly, without the pressure of a payroll due date.

3. Key performance indicators

SAP Payroll Control Center's key performance indicators (KPIs) provide the payroll team with a way to measure the statistics of your payroll run. You can view such KPIs as total gross payroll, total taxes, total net pay and so on, before running payroll. You can also compare the numbers between periods.

4. Payroll Control Center Event Listener

The Payroll Control Center Event Listener for Pre-Payroll Monitoring enables data changes to be picked up on a periodic basis (for example, every 15 minutes via a scheduled job in the back-end payroll system). You can then run these data changes against payroll alerts to see if the changes impact alert results.

For example, if you have an alert for an employee record that is missing a payment method and bank account and an employee maintains his own bank account, the Event Listener will automatically remove this alert from the PCC without any payroll department intervention. The system is proactively keeping you aware of every alert as data is changed and when you navigate to the PCC, which means you can be sure you are looking at up-to-date information. This becomes part of your pre-payroll process, which means fewer issues when you run payroll.