Multiple Employees who share the same Dependent

[_Gia]

Introduction:

The dependent portlet in SuccessFactors Employee Central is used to store data related to family members of a company’s employees. Typically, each dependent is linked to one single employee.

However, there are several situations that can occur where we would like to link one single dependent to multiple employees; for example, in the case of a child of a couple who both work for the same company, or two siblings who have a parent who is registered as a dependent for them. With standard functionality, you’d either have to choose which employee has the dependent linked to them or maintain the same dependent in two different places.

Fortunately, SuccessFactors offers us a way to handle these situations.

Solution:

It is currently not possible to assign the same dependent to two different employees via the User Interface; this must be done through the Import functionality instead. As a consequence, any changes brought to the custom fields of such dependents also need to be processed via Import.

In order to assign the same dependent to two different employees the following import files need to be used:

• Biographical Info – use this file to create the Dependent that will be assigned to the employees.
  • In the person-id-external column, assign a suitable ID you can identify the Dependent by (this ID will be used in the next steps)
• Consolidated Dependents – use this file to assign the previously created dependent to an employee and fill in any information the dependents require (eg. first name, last name, date of birth, citizenship, national ID, etc.)
• Person Relationship – use this file to link the dependent to the other employee as well; kindly note that you need to fill in the custom fields with the same information as in the Consolidated Dependents file, otherwise those fields will show up as blank.
• In the Consolidated Dependents in Person Relationship files:
  • the Related Person Id External should be the person-id-external assigned to the Dependent in the Biographical Information file
  • the Person ID External should be the ID of the User you are assigning the Dependent to

In cases where the same dependent is assigned to two Users the behavior for manual updates is the following:

• updating dependents predefined fields (Biographical, Personal, National ID Information) will display the changes on both User records on the Employee Profile in the Dependents Section.
• updating dependents custom fields will only display the changes on the Employee Profile the change was initiated on and will result in an error when editing the same dependent information on the second User.

The reason why the error in the screenshot is received is because a manual change was done to a custom field. After noticing that the change did not automatically propagate to the other record, the same change was manually performed on the 2nd record as well, which prompted the error.

A workaround for this is to use a different effective date to process the same change on the 2nd record. However, I do not recommend this as it is unclear what impact it might have in the long run. The recommendation would be to only update these cases via Import.

Summary:

• If your client wants to process the changes manually, they can only do so for dependents Biographical Information, Personal Information or National ID fields. The information only needs to be changed on one record and will be reflected on the other as well.
• If the change is for any of the custom fields, it will need to be done through import files. For this, only the Person Relationship file can be used. Kindly note that the same change will need to be done on both records, therefore include both employees that share a dependent in this file and fill in the custom fields with the dependent information for both of them. 

Notes:

• the Person ID External should be the employee the dependent is being assigned to
• the Related Person Id External should be the person-id-external set for the dependent in the previous file
• the Consolidated Dependents Import works in Full Purge mode and is used to create the Dependent; every time this is imported it will overwrite for that Dependent so only use it once per dependent; don’t use this file to assign the dependent to both employees.