Introduction
Bonus capping is a lesser-known feature of Variable Pay which can automatically cap employees' final calculated payouts in worksheets, thereby reducing the time spent on data consistency checks in Executive Review before bonuses are published back to Employee Central and then to Payroll.
They can be combined with a custom override field at the summary level where Comp Administrators can enter the value of their choice as Final Payout.
Two capping options are available (Plan Setup > Set Bonus Calculation) : "By Bonus Plan" or "By Employee" and each of them can only be used if the standard Final Payout field (columnID = finalPayout) is used at the summary level of the Variable Pay template.

Examples
Let's take a look at how each of these options impacts the final calculation in the case of an employee who was promoted (and was hence on 2 different Bonus Plans) during the Fiscal Year (
credit Guillaume Bouillette, former SAP Support Engineer) :


Configuration
How are Bonus Cap Percentages imported in both cases ?
For both "By Bonus Plan" and "By Employee" options, the percent must be loaded in the Bonus Plan
CSV Import file as per the screenshot below (the full file from my demo environment can be downloaded
here).

However, for it to work correctly in the "By Employee" setup, all bonus cap percentages must be imported
as the same number for all bonus plans (my above screenshot would work in the By Employee option for that matter).
Once the file has been imported, a Run Bonus Calculation Job must be triggered for the system to apply the correct cap to the payouts.
The recording below provides some insights on the administration of Bonus Caps in the Admin UI of a Variable Pay template :
https://youtu.be/Wh8I0T4KiaA
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All the best,
Xavier
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