Typically, companies are running their payrolls on Monday or Tuesday so they can get a payroll out by the end of the week and make direct deposits in a timely manner. 

When dealing with that, typically audits should start at least a day or two prior. If it's on Monday, by Friday you might want to start looking at some basic things:

• Do I have all my audit reports? 
• Does everybody have a cost center? 
• Does every employee have an Infotype 9?

Then, based on your report, you can set it up to find any exceptions that occurred over the weekend. On Monday morning, the report was already processed early in the morning, so when you arrive you can now review it and look for problems: "There's a couple employees that were added over the weekend by HR, but the cost center is missing, so I need to get those addressed."

As part of a bigger audit check, you can actually run Time Evaluation and Payroll over the weekend before you arrive on Monday. Then you can have process models set up to automatically generate some of the documents or you can set up batch jobs that will run subsequent jobs.

One of the clients I've been working with runs payroll on Monday. They started to look at options to get the process started earlier by using the weekend. They were all working until 10:00 or 11:00 on Monday night and that was taking a toll. So we started running time evaluation late Sunday and we set up  a standard SAP batch program to release the payroll and then start payroll. When everyone arrived on Monday, employees had been processed through time evaluation, payroll, payroll journals had been run along with other audit reports.

They also gave HR a much larger window to go in and make HR master data fixes instead of the usual hour or an hour and a half.  HR now has the better part of the morning to tweak data and put in new hires.

The best part of the automation was a reduction in the payroll department overtime and a more relaxed atmosphere. Error rates reduced signifantly because of the gained time and employee trust of their paycheck increased.

Map out your payroll processes and look for areas that could be run earlier to get a head start on audits. The time will be well spent and payoff dividends in the long run.

- Mike Timm, Integrated Consulting Group
@MikeTimmSAP
mtimm@integratedcg.com