HR in SAP Business One: what the employee master does, what Dutch HR needs on top, and where a personnel system comes in

What is in the Human Resources module.

• The employee master (table OHEM): name, position and job title, department, branch, manager, cost centre, status, start and termination date with a reason, work and home address, phone numbers, email, a picture. All of it on one card with tabs.
• The Finance tab: salary with unit and currency, employee costs, bank account, and on Personal the ID number and the social insurance number. So the fields exist; who gets to see them is another matter (see below).
• Absence (HEM1): lines with a from and to date, a reason as free text of twenty characters and who approved it. Whole days; no hours, no type, no balance.
• Education, previous employment and reviews as simple lists on the card, and roles (sales, purchasing, technician) and teams that other modules use: an employee with the technician role can be picked on a service call.
• Three reports: the employee list, the absence report and the phone book. Plus the time sheet from project management and the company's holiday calendar, which absence and delivery dates use.
• The organisation lives elsewhere in B1 and is solid: departments, cost centres (profit centres with dimensions) and branches. Finance keeps those, and the employee card points to them.

That is an address book with a history. It is at the Dutch rules, the workflow and the privacy that it stops.

What it lacks.

• Leave balances. B1 has no leave types, no accrual by contract hours and no balance per year. The Dutch split into statutory leave (expires on 1 July of the next year) and extra-statutory leave (lapses after five years) is not there, so neither is the duty to warn before leave expires.
• Requests and approvals. An employee can do nothing themselves: no leave request, no sick report, no change of address. Everything goes through someone with rights on the master data.
• Sick leave under Dutch law. A sick report in B1 is an absence line. There is no sick leave file, no timeline for the Gatekeeper Improvement Act (occupational health service in week 1, problem analysis week 6, plan of action week 8, UWV notification week 42, end at week 104), no counting a relapse together and no absence rate.
• Contract history. One start date and one termination date, no series of contracts with type, hours, probation and end date. The chain rule, the probation maxima and the notice period are therefore something someone has to watch by hand.
• Who sees what. Authorisations in B1 apply per window, not per tab. Whoever may open the employee master sees, in practice, the salary, the bank account and the social insurance number too. For a sales rep looking up a colleague that is too much, and the GDPR agrees.
• Documents with a retention period. Attachments can go on the card, but without a type, a retention period or a clean-up list; the copy of an ID stays as long as the contract does.
• Reviews, signals, payroll. The reviews list is a table, not a cycle with forms and goals. Nobody gets a nudge when a contract ends or an ID expires. And Dutch payroll is not in B1; the payroll provider or the accountant does that, and the mutations go there by email.

Three ways companies fill the gap.

1. A spreadsheet and the payroll provider. Where most companies with thirty to fifty people are. Leave in Excel, sick reports in email, contracts in a drawer, and the payroll provider as the only system with a correct start date. The employee in B1 is created once and rarely updated afterwards.

2. A cloud HR suite. Leave, sick leave, file and self-service, for €5 to €10 per employee per month with a minimum. Good work, but none of the Dutch suites talks to SAP Business One: the employee, the department and the absence are entered twice, and the B1 reports and the field service planning know nothing. And the company's most private data sits with a third party.

3. A personnel system that writes the employee to B1. The HR system is the source for the person; B1 stays the source for the organisation and the money. The employee card and the absence go to B1 through the Service Layer, departments and cost centres come from B1, and what is sensitive stays in the HR system. Enter it once, and the rest of B1 sees the right people.

What to check before you choose.

• What goes to B1, and what never? Name, position, department, manager, cost centre, branch and the start and end dates belong in B1: other modules use them. Salary, social insurance number, bank account, home address, documents and the sick leave file do not, precisely because B1 is used by more people than HR. Ask a vendor for that list.
• Where does the absence land? On the employee's standard absence lines (HEM1), or in a table of its own? The first keeps the B1 absence report right and lets a field service planning board plan around the leave. Mind that those lines only know whole days and a twenty-character reason; ask how half days are sent.
• Only through the Service Layer. The employee (EmployeesInfo), the absence lines, departments, cost centres (ProfitCenters), branches (BusinessPlaces), holidays and users can all be read and written through the Service Layer, on SQL Server and HANA alike. An integration that writes straight into the SAP database loses the support of SAP and your partner. Changes belong in a PATCH of the integration's own fields only, so fields of other add-ons stay put, and never in a DELETE of an employee.
• Who sees what in the HR system itself? An employee only themselves, a manager only the direct team, HR everything, and the administrator of the technology no files at all. Ask whether that is enforced on the server or merely hidden on the screen, and whether an employee can see who viewed their file.
• One technical SAP user. An integration signs in as one user with at least an Indirect Access licence; employees sign in to the HR system, not to B1. Which SAP licences your people need beyond that is for you and your B1 partner to agree: SAP licenses by named user, also for indirect access through an add-on. More in the licence guide.
• Where is the data, and who is the processor? With a cloud suite the vendor is a processor and you need a processor agreement. With software on your own server you stay the controller and nothing leaves the building; do ask how the social insurance number, bank account and documents are encrypted and what a backup looks like.

How KHRM approaches it.

KHRM is our option 3. A simple personnel system for 10 to 250 employees with Dutch employment law as the default settings: file, contracts, job structure and organisation chart, leave in buckets with expiry, sick leave with the Gatekeeper timeline, review cycles, documents with retention periods and self-service. It also works without SAP; with the link switched on it writes the employee card and the absence to B1 through the Service Layer, reads departments, cost centres and branches from B1, and keeps salary, social insurance number, bank account, home address, documents and the sick leave file in KHRM. Five fixed roles, enforced on the server; the administrator sees no files. It runs on your own server and never does payroll. It is in development: the foundation is built and tested against a simulated B1, the rest is a clickable design, with no price and no date. The product page says exactly where it stands.

Sources: SAP Business One help documentation (Human Resources: employee master data, absence, reports); the SAP Business One 10.0 database reference (OHEM, HEM1, HEM6, OHPS, OUDP, OPRC, OBPL, OHLD); the Service Layer $metadata of SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2608 (EmployeesInfo, EmployeeAbsenceInfoLines, Departments, ProfitCenters, BusinessPlaces, Holidays, Users); SAP's Service Layer guide (PATCH and collections, user-defined fields, the SQLQueries allowlist). The Dutch rules: Civil Code book 7 (leave, chain rule, probation, notice period) and the Regulation on the procedure in the first and second year of sickness.