Time Structures (SAP Library - Personnel Time Management (PT))

Time Structures

Use

To represent and process the time structures in your company, the SAP System requires the following essential pieces of information:

Which times and working patterns employees have to work

You can store information on working times and patterns in work schedules. A work schedule describes the planned duration of working time and the working time pattern for a specific calendar period. The different elements of the work schedule permit flexibility when entering working time models and working times. When you customize the system, you can define a number of working time variants for different regional public holiday calendars and employee subgroup and personnel subarea groupings.

Which weekdays and public holidays employees have to work: Reference to the public holiday calendar

The public holiday calendar is based on an actual year and allows you to apply your working time models to a specific time period.

It is essential to use the public holiday calendar for recording your employees’ attendances and absences: the payroll program can only be run correctly if Sundays and public holidays and so on are taken into account.

The public holiday calendar is created on the basis of the regional and national holidays that are valid for your personnel areas and subareas. Company-specific days off can also be entered in the calendar.

Which work schedule deviations are recorded and how they are processed

You can represent the time structures in your company using working time models, the calendar, and by maintaining the Time Management infotypes. These options allow you to enter all time data and related information for your employees. This time data includes attendance and absence times, availability times, and overtime, for example.

The following are only a few of the possible Customizing options which allow you to control the entry and processing of time data in your system:

In addition to the common absence types such as leave and illness, you can enter special absence types such as additional leave for severely challenged persons, time off for overtime, and maternity leave. The system also provides special infotypes for entry of absences that may require further processing - absence as the result of an industrial accident, for example.

You can define specific plausibility checks for the entry of attendances and absences. In this way, you can specify that only female employees are entitled to maternity protection, and that only severely challenged employees are entitled to additional leave for severely challenged persons, for instance.
Furthermore, you can specify the actual times, weekdays, Sundays, and public holidays on which particular absences and attendances are permitted.

Quotas can be assigned to employees for particular attendances and absences. The quotas are maintained automatically in the system. The most common of these is the leave quota, in which you can store the number of days of leave to which an employee is entitled.

The system itself can also set up absence quotas. This is the case with, for example, automatic leave accrual, flextime models and time off for overtime.

Attendance quotas enable you to control the amount of overtime employees can work, and also when they are permitted to work overtime.

Time constraints are used in Time Management to prevent undesired overlapping or collision of attendances and/or absences.

You can define how long an employee is entitled to a particular attendance or absence type, whether the employee is to be paid for the attendance/absence, and the rate and duration of payment.

You can set indicators that are processed individually when time data is evaluated in Payroll. These allow you to define how employees are to be remunerated for working on days off or public holidays, for example.