Although no regulations mandate the issuance of individual payroll statements to employees, in the vast majority of companies it is the pay slips that fill the primary role of providing information on the amount of individual salary components and mandatory and voluntary contributions. However, if an employer decides to use this form of communication with employees, he has a number of conditions to meet related to maintaining the confidentiality of earnings information, protection of personal data and secure distribution.
In order to fulfill the above obligations, companies use secret envelopes, require a signature certifying receipt, and send slips by mail. Handling this process in a company with a few hundred or a few thousand employees is a time-consuming activity, and additionally expensive. Paper, equipment and supplies, and the cost of postage (because, after all, in many companies, payroll is centralized for local branches or some employees are permanently working in the field) is one thing. It is also worth realizing the high cost of a payroll specialist to print and distribute slips every month.
The Hortex Group decided to modernize this form of contact with employees and has been using the solution since March 2014. E-pasks in SAP HR.
E-strips in SAP HR
Available from All for One SAP Add-ons , E-slips in SAP HR is an extension of the SAP standard that allows you to send salary information by e-mail to employees, while guaranteeing full data confidentiality.
The standard source of information for the E-pass application is the settled current payroll from the SAP HR. Also in the system, in the HR data of employees, email addresses are stored. Their list is the basis for the distribution of pay slips. At Horteks, the solution was launched in Poland in the first stage for more than 400 employees.
As Ewa Kaczor, SAP Manager at Hortex, points out, “We are successively adding more company employees to the E-pasks distribution list. We would like the solution to ultimately be used by all employees with company e-mail accounts."
Adding more employees to the E-pass distribution list is very simple. All you need to do is to make sure that in the employee’s HR data there is an e-mail address field filled in, check the appropriate option and send the employee the generated password.
Although according to a legal opinion held by the BCC (currently All for One Poland), employees’ consent is not required to receive email correspondence from their employer – at Horteks they have decided to obtain such consent.
Confidentiality
The pay slip sent from the system is simply a PDF file as an attachment to a standard email message. The PDF is encrypted and a password is required to read it.
The solution meets the high requirements of confidentiality and data protection, thanks to encryption methods that give a high level of security.
The passwords, generated by a random password generator, were given to employees even before the first strips were sent out. In the event that it is forgotten, lost or declassified, an employee can ask for a new one to be generated. This level of protection provides a greater guarantee of confidentiality than previously used traditional forms of distribution. The encrypted information is only available to an employee with an email account and the password to the encrypted file.
Ewa Kaczor, SAP Manager at Hortex
Currently, distribution of strips to employees included in the distribution list takes a few minutes and does not incur additional costs.
For the employee
The E-strip solution in SAP HR leaves full freedom regarding the appearance of the strip and the information it contains – this data is defined at the SAP HR level. At Horteks, for the convenience of employees, it was decided to keep the current, well-known layout of the bar, with the company logo attached.
The E-strip application is also a new medium of communication with employees, which can be used not only for the distribution of salary information. The solution allows personalization of a standard e-mail message (e.g. a named header) and its free formatting (HTML). The e-mail, in addition to fixed content (e.g. a confidentiality clause), can contain additional, occasional information from the life of the company or reminders about HR and payroll events (e.g. a reminder about the deadline for the annual tax return, a reminder to fill out an application for additional care leave, etc.).
And if necessary – at the employee’s request, the payroll specialist can resend the strip for any period. Such an operation takes only as much time as it takes to launch the application, find the archived message and resend it.
For the company
E-pasks are not just about convenience and savings. The solution can also act as a company’s payroll archive. The application stores all documents sent to employees, as well as the payrolls underlying their generation. In addition, such an archive – useful in itself – provides extensive reporting capabilities. It is possible, for example, to check when (to the minute), by whom and for which employees the pay slips were generated (log details) and sent.
In the solution, you can define the type of information stored in the archive (whether only the information about sending the strip, or also the e-mail and the strip itself). The system also allows you to see the status of emails: ready to send, sent, sending failed.
Simple commissioning and operation
E-pasks in SAP HR is a ready-to-use solution, available as a shipment, a “package" to be installed on the customer’s system. The minor customizations that are necessary before the application is launched already take place from the customer’s system and can be performed by a BCC consultant or an experienced SAP key user.
“After installing the solution in the Hortex system, the further steps of assigning an e-mail address in the employee’s master data, consent to receive e-passes, and defining the content of the cover e-mail to the e-pass were done by ourselves. The tools provided with the solution allowing us to upload previously prepared information in bulk were very helpful. The solution is simple and intuitive to use, and does not cause any problems both at the stage of adapting it to the specifics of our company and in its current use," Ewa Kaczor emphasizes.
Also, the day-to-day operation of the program is very simple. The HR specialist selects in SAP the payroll period (or a specific supplementary list) and the employees for whom the mailing is to be made. The selection screen resembles the standard selection screens for payroll reports in SAP HR. When the report is run, the operator receives a list of employees associated with a particular payroll. The e-mail dispatch can be executed automatically to all persons or only to selected ones, manually. All that remains is to press the “Generate and send" button.
“At the Hortex Group, we have long been looking for a solution that would allow us to quickly and securely send our employees working in the office and, most importantly, in the field information about their salary. Finally, it turned out that such a solution appeared on the market. The E-slips application proposed by BCC allows us to quickly and securely send such information on an ongoing basis. Printing strips in paper form is time-consuming and involves costs associated with the purchase of appropriate paper and the operation of the printer, not to mention the inconvenience of the printer itself for printing… Currently, the distribution of strips to employees included in the distribution list takes a few minutes and does not involve additional costs.
The solution was welcomed by our employees. We are a company that strives to implement modern solutions and is not afraid to take on challenges and test innovative solutions". – Ewa Kaczor concludes.