Overview of SAP Financial Applications
Different views of financial position and performance of an organization can be shown through various SAP financial applications. They are SAP FI (Financial Accounting), SAP CO (Controlling), SAP TR (Treasury), SAP PS (Project System), SAP IM (Investment Management), SAP EC (Enterprise Controlling).
Accounting Information
Accounting Information is needed by two group users. Users that require financial information that needed to be reported to the legal authorities periodically. For example these are banks, shareholders, legal authorities, tax authorities etc. Standardized accounting for external users purpose is sometimes called financial accounting. This information managed in the FI module. Managers from different levels and other personal within the company usually need financial report of internal operation periodically. They are senior managers, accountant, administrative employee, other employees etc. The internal non-standardized accounting that supports the decision-making process generally refers to managerial accounting. An example would be the budget vs actual cost comparison report for a particular department. The CO module is the application component that provides this data.
SAP Financial Accounting (FI)
This module generate financial reports used for external reporting purposes for example Balance Sheets and Profit and Loss statements. These reports usually comply with general accounting standards of set by the local authorities. In this site we learn to configure and implement the organizational units, master data and documents for Financial Accounting. We also learn to configure and implement the SAP business processes like payment, closing or dunning.
First step we will create financial accounting organizational units, maintain master data, generate automatic financial data transactions, control the display of financial transaction, financial data analysis.
Organizational Units in SAP FI
Company Code
SAP accounting entity is the smallest organizational unit for which a complete set of accounts can be planned and made. A company within a corporate group is one example. In SAP Financial Accounting a company is identified with a unique four character key called Company Code. It represents an independent legal accounting entity for external purposes. Therefore balance sheets and profit/loss statements required by local authorities can be created at this level. For international company with operation company all over the world a separate Company Code for each country is created as a legal entity in the country.
Every Company Code has a General Ledger which generates a legally required balance sheets and profit and loss statements issued to legal authorities and has a Company Tax code. Every financially transaction in SAP required one Company Code.
To create a company code copy an existing company code (in R/3 standard system Company Code 0001 is a template for a general company code), which means you also copy the existing company code parameters i.e. the definition, global parameters, customizing tables, general ledger accounts, account determination etc. You may edit in your new company code when necessary after copying.
Company Code Definition include: 4 character company code key, company name, address, city, country, currency, language. Global Parameters include: chart of accounts, fiscal year, company code defaults
The Fiscal Year
The variant principle is used to assign special properties to one or more objects. For example we can define the variant K4 for our fiscal year variant. Then we populate it with values for example we define properties of K4 has posting period as “calendar year” .Then we can assign the variant K4 to any company codes that use this type of calendar.
A Fiscal Year is the variant that separate accounting transactions into different periods and assigned to a company code. Standard fiscal year variants are already defined in the SAP system and can be used as templates. For example a Fiscal Year has 12 posting periods like calendar year from January to December with start and finish date. The system derives the posting period from the posting date of the transaction .
A year-independent variant is fiscal year variant that uses the same number of periods, and posting periods start and end at the same day of the year. It can be a calendar year or non-calendar year. If it is defined as calendar year the posting periods are equal to the months of the year, therefore it has 12 posting periods. A non-calendar-year can have between 1 to 16 posting periods.
A year-dependent fiscal year is if the start and the end of the posting periods of some fiscal years will be different from the dates of other fiscal years.
Currency Code
Currency code is the code for currency used in the organization. Exchange Rate type is used for maintaining different exchange rates between two currencies.