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SAP SuccessFactors Compensation provides flexibility in accommodating every organization’s unique rewards structure and philosophy.  However, sometimes this flexibility causes some complexity in the setup, adding up to the cost of ownership.  With this new feature, we will be able to apply eligibility rules to custom fields in the same manner that we have historically been applying to the standard fields, thus simplifying the setup process.  This feature allows us to set up budgets to reflect custom field eligibility for the next Compensation review cycle.

Let us see few basic questions related to this -

  • Are you looking for different ways to simplify the setup of your organization’s compensation template?

  • Have you configured various workarounds to disable custom columns on the worksheet?

  • Have you ever implemented a workaround to exclude the users who are not eligible from the custom budgets?

  • Will you be interested to learn a new approach to optimize the budget configurations?

  • Are you planning for your company’s next compensation cycle this Fall?

If the questions above capture the issues that you are facing while configuring the budgets for your compensation review cycle, then please read on.

Point to remember – The next compensation cycle starts when the current compensation cycle ends, and the compensation planning is a year-long process!

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Total Rewards professionals usually use high complex budget configurations as part of their compensation planning process. Most often they extend the standard budget configuration offering by using complex custom calculations to derive their overall budget. Compensation budgets based on custom fields do not exclude employees from the overall budget, if they were not eligible for focal planning or had partial eligibility. This behaviour is different from the budgets which are based on the compensation standard fields like merit, promotion etc. For example, if an employee is not eligible for merit then this employee will not be

considered for merit budget calculation however if an employee is not eligible for a custom field then they will contribute to the budget for custom field even though the manager can’t plan for that employee.

As a result, organizations must use workarounds using additional fields and lookup tables to override the budget to 0 for the ineligible employee, which would add up to the complexity of the process. With SAP SuccessFactors Compensation handling the custom field eligibility in the budget calculations, the planning process for focal planning cycle will be very much simplified.

What will work and what wouldn’t?

We can enable up to 20 custom columns with the eligibility flag and the following custom field datatypes are supported to enable field eligibility.

  • Money

  • Amount

  • String

  • Date

  • Decimal

  • Percent

Username is not supported.

Note – The custom field should be marked as reportable to enable the eligibility flag.

Configuration Details

Let us understand the difference in behaviour between the handling of eligibility in the budgets based on standard fields versus custom fields.

Lets take an example, we have the same budget configuration for standard field ‘merit’ and custom field ‘customMerit’ in the compensation template.

100.0

100.0

If we launch the worksheet based on this configuration with all users as eligible then the budget is correctly calculated as $60000 for both Merit and Custom Merit fields.

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If one of the employees (Olsen Julie) becomes ineligible for a merit recommendation, then the standard merit budget is updated accordingly to reflect the eligibility change and the field is grayed out on the worksheet. However, the custom budget is not updated, and the field is also editable.

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From the H2 2020 release, we have been adding a new attribute at the field level named “Enable Rules Eligibility” and the corresponding XML value is “enableEligibility”.

  • Navigate to the Admin Center.

  • In the Tools search field, type Compensation Home.

  • Open the Compensation template and navigate to the Design Worksheet page.

  • Select the custom field from the

  • If you want to enable this field for eligibility rules, then mark this attribute as checked or directly set it to true in the XML.

  • Save the Compensation template.

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  • Once the template is saved, we will see this field in the template Eligibility page.

  • Update the eligibility for Custom Merit to No.

  • Save and apply the rule.

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  • Run the mass update job with update budget and eligibility settings as checked.

  • Open the worksheet.

  • You will see that Custom Merit budget is updated correctly to reflect the eligibility and Custom Merit field is grayed out for the ineligible user.

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  • Generate the Compensation Eligibility Ad-hoc report for this template.

  • We will see that the custom fields with Enable Rules Eligibility as checked and with a matching eligibility rule are available for selection.