Reusing Story Reports Across Annual Compensation Plan Templates

[JamesVu-DC]

Hi everyone

I'm looking for guidance on how to efficiently reuse Story Reports for Compensation Planning across yearly review cycles in SAP SuccessFactors.

Each year, we copy the Compensation Planning template for the new compensation cycle (e.g., from "2024 Compensation Review" to "2025 Compensation Review"). We also have a budget overview report, following Learn How to Create A Compensation Budget Dashboard in Report Stories  

The challenge is that Compensation Planning Story Reports are template-specific. There is no option to switch the data source to a new template, and no support for referencing “all templates” or a generic dataset. As a result, we need to manually rebuild the report each year — including recreating queries, tables, and charts — even though the structure is identical.

What we’ve tried:

Saving the Story Report as a template: layout is retained, but queries must be rebuilt from scratch.

Exporting the report: results in package files, and no way to edit

Attempted to edit the query or switch the data source: not possible within current capabilities.

Question: Is there a supported method or workaround to reuse a Story Report across multiple, structurally identical Compensation templates (e.g., annual cycles)? Any insights or approaches would be appreciated, @xavierlegarrec  

EDIT: there is ongoing Enhancement Requests, kindly cast your votes so that we can have something better 🙂

Compensation Story Reports 

Ability to report all Compensation forms at once via story reports 

Thanks. 

James Vu

[JamesVu-DC · Accepted solution]

So, as confirmed by SAP COMP Experts, we will need to live with this for now.

For a better future, pls cast your vote to these enhancement requests. Lets hope that we can have it next release 🙂

Compensation Story Reports

Ability to report all Compensation forms at once via story reports 

[xavierlegarrec]

@JamesVu-DC @lesleyr 

"This item is already in our backlog. It requires an update from a different team, and we will try to get it prioritized for the 1H-2026 release.

The solution we are looking at is to decouple the template ID from the Data source (query). This will enable the data source to be updated, but the visualisation in the story may have to be re-created. So, it will still recover some adjustments when the template is changed. "

All the best,

Xavier

[JamesVu-DC]

This is the best new of the week, Xavier. Thank you so much mate

[xavierlegarrec]

Hi @JamesVu-DC 

I don't think there is any workaround here (this question has been raised before) and I do not know whether it is being discussed by our reporting product team but I did share your message and the link to the enhancement with them and with the Compensation Product team for added visibility. If I hear anything I will update here.

Thanks

Xavier

[JamesVu-DC]

Thanks Xavier for your support. Btw, always appreciate your valuable sharing.

[lesleyr]

Hi James - I recently had the same issue/question hoping we wouldn't need to rebuild the report each cycle and reached out to one of our reporting consultants hoping we could just change the mapped template similar to table reports. Unfortunately, this is not currently possible. I came to suggest this would be a great enhancement request and see you've already done this.

Thanks,

Lesley

[JamesVu-DC]

Hi Lesly. We can see clearly that it is a shared pain for all COMP consultants and admins. Lets hope that SAP will nail this enhancement soon 🙂