One of the key activities after payroll is posting the payroll results to the FI system and to make sure everything is balanced and clean. This blog is based on the scenario that SAP HCM and SAP FI are on two separate systems. Let’s discuss all the required steps to setup payroll posting.

One important thing with payroll results posting is that most of the hard work is outside the system. By that, I mean gathering the requirements from your FI or G/L counterpart. The best way to do this is to make a spreadsheet of all the wage types and do the hard exercise of mapping all the wage types and their corresponding G/L accounts.

Identify expense items, payables and some wage types that are doublebooked both as expense and payable. Should you post the results differently for different employee groups, with/without employee detail, with/without cost assignment etc?

There are two parts to setting up payroll posting.

Configuration/Master Data: Set up the required G/L accounts, symbolic accounts, assigning wage types to symbolic accounts and all other required configuration. We will get into details required for this step.

Technical Setup: ALE extracts payroll results and posts to FI. This will be a separate blog by itself and I will try to cover it later.

The first thing you need to do is setup the required G/L accounts in HCM system. You can also setup a ALE from SAP FI to HCM system for this. But if there is only handful of G/Ls, then you can choose to setup these as well. Make sure the G/L account is setup under the right category – balance sheet or expense etc and any other attributes. Transaction codes to create G/L accounts – FS00, FSP0. It’s advisable to take the help of a G/L expert if you are not sure how to set these up. You might need to replicate parts of configuration from the FI system.

Most of the configuration you require is under IMG node Payroll–>Payroll USA–>Posting to Financial Accounting–>Activities in HR-System

1. Setup feature PPMOD if you need to setup your posting based on type of the employee. Here you can define employee groupings required for account determination and setup the feature that assigns each employee to a grouping.

2. Define symbolic accounts – In this step, you can create all the symbolic accounts. Wage types are mapped to the actual G/L account using symbolic accounts. One of the important attributes while creating symbolic accounts is the account assignment type. You can also specify if the results should post with/without employee detail.

3. Wage type posting attributes – In this step, you define which wage types should be posted, how often, and assign the corresponding symbolic accounts. You need to do this setup for your regular wage types and tax wage types.

4. Make sure posting date is generated for the payroll periods.

5. Posting variants – This is the variant you will use while creating the posting run. You can copy the standard variant and make changes as required. Here, you can specifythe  document type to be used when the accounting document is created on FI side. If you need to setup custom document types, then you need to create these in the HCM system first. You can also set a prefix using “Prefix for Reference.” This is stored on the reference field of the accounting document.

Payroll–>Payroll: USA–>Posting to Financial Accounting–>Activities in AC-System

In this step, you can map the FI G/L accounts to the symbolic accounts in HCM system. Set the EE group indicator in order to see additional column for EE group. This will let you define the mapping per employee grouping (refer to feature PPMOD).

Completing the above steps along with the ALE setup between SAP FI and HCM completes the required setup for posting the payroll results.

Once the payroll run is completed, use transaction PC00_M99_CIPE to create a posting run for the pay period to be posted. Always create a simulation run to make sure there are no errors in posting.

Once a posting run is created successfully, you should be able to see the documents. The next step is to go to transaction PCP0 to release and post these documents to FI system.

You can use the standard SAP report RPCIPA00 to look at the history of all the documents posted.