
<p>Let me clarify, that time management is a very-very wide topic ;to discus. In my 15 years experience 90% of payroll consultants were not aware that time management is tightly coupled with payroll. They were not aware about time schemas and thought time is only absences and attendances appearing in their payroll logic. ;</p> 
 
 
 
<p>Well, it&#8217;s true and false the same time. We all understand time management is important to pay payroll when it&#8217;s paid based on hours worked. But we need time to calculate efficiency, track performance, do some analytics. There are a lot of areas where we need time in real life and SAP helps us. Did you know time could be transferred to Plant Maintenance or Controlling? Even project system module uses time hours. ;</p> 
 
 
 
<p>Basically we can split time management in three general topics or areas, name it.</p> 
 
 
 
<p>First is work schedules and attendance management. Here we build work schedules for our employees, we track their attendances and absences. We account time quotas for vacations or allowed overtimes. It&#8217;s all look like maintaining data infotypes in odd PA30 transaction. There are few settings, nothing really complicated. Most complicated parts I&#8217;d say are to set data entry interfaces like PDC, PTMW, PP60, CATS, Fiori and others.On today market a lot of positions for time management consultant in SAP associated with this type of settings &#8211; just infotypes and interfaces, simple absence counting rules and leave quotas. It&#8217;s simple guys. With respect to time accounting.</p> 
 
 
 
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<p>Here is the most complicated part. Time accounting or time evaluation. It&#8217;s an intermediate step between actually recording time and analyzing this time in payroll. We need to read schedules, quotas, absences and attendances. We need to understand what time is overtime, what time is night time, what time is in hazard conditions, what time is a special pay time and so on. We need to build time balances for the third part to report them. And here comes the most complicated thing &#8211; coding. I&#8217;ve heard a lot of time that CO and HR are the most complicated modules in SAP because they both have own coding language. Some sort of old-school assembler where you use special short codes and operands to manage data in memory. The same history is here &#8211; open PE01 transaction and TM04 schema. Hit view button and try to calm yourself down. PE02 transaction is for dessert. ;</p> 
 
 
 
<p>Yes, it a long way and steep curve to learn this, but that&#8217;s why payroll guys are paid more in SAP. Payroll has the same schemas and rules, the same and more complexity in algorithms to solve with these functions and operations. And that&#8217;s why I wonder why a lot of payroll consultants don&#8217;t know time accounting &#8211; it&#8217;s almost the same like in payroll &#8211; what&#8217;s tough to learn it too? ;</p> 
 
 
 
<p>Third part is reporting and analytics. Usually users are satisfied with simple absence reporting and time balances. But what if they need something more flexible and complicated. Our duty is to provide this data with a right groupings, simple logic and enough analytics data to build pivot tables, neat graphs and so forth. How to do this? Learn BI, BW, BO functionality. This is a tool for analytics, and HR consultant must know how his plan time type will look in pivot production report with reference to cost center hierarchy or by orgunits. It&#8217;s your duty to understand what absences to group logically and with regards to business nature, how to convert and match time data to payroll data (i&#8217;m not saying to setup payroll). Is education leave time to be counted towards total work time?</p>