The preceding figure shows a fiscal year that has 12 posting periods and four special periods. The posting periods are marked 1 to 12. The special periods are marked 13 to 16. If the posting date falls in the twelfth period, you can post the transaction in any one of the special periods ranging from 13 to 16.
You must define a fiscal year with the posting periods to assign business transactions to different periods. The fiscal year is defined as a variant and assigned to a company code.
The fiscal year variant contains definitions of posting periods and special periods. Special periods are used for postings that are assigned to the business process of year-end closing and not for time periods. In total, you can define 16 periods.
The system derives the posting period from the posting date. If the posting date falls within the last normal posting period, you can post the transaction in one of the special periods.
Standard fiscal year variants are already defined in the system and you can use them as templates.
Hint
The fiscal year variant does not specify whether a posting period is open or closed. This data is managed in another table/variant. The fiscal year variant only defines the number of periods and their start and end dates.
Year-Independent Fiscal Year Variant
The preceding figure shows a non-calendar year with six posting periods starting from April to March. January to March belong to the old fiscal year and have the indicator -1.
If each fiscal year of a fiscal year variant uses the same number of periods and the posting periods always start and end on the same day of the year, the variant is year-independent.
There are two types of year-independent fiscal year variants, as follows:
- Calendar year
- Non-calendar year
If you define a fiscal year as the calendar year, then the posting periods are equivalent to the months of the year. Therefore, a fiscal year must have 12 posting periods.
If a fiscal year is defined as a non-calendar year, each of the posting periods are defined with their end dates. A non-calendar year can be defined with the posting periods ranging from 1 to 16. If the non-calendar year does not start on January 1st, the periods of the year that belong to the former or the coming fiscal year must have an indicator -1 or +1.
If the fiscal year differs from the calendar year, but the posting periods correspond to calendar months, then select 29 as the day limit for February to take leap years into consideration.
Fiscal years are usually year-independent.
Year-Specific Fiscal Year Variants
If all of the fiscal years in a fiscal year variant have the same number of posting periods, you only have to define the different period dates for the different years. The preceding figure demonstrates this example.
A fiscal year variant is defined as year-specific based on one or both of the following conditions:
- The start and the end dates of the posting periods for some fiscal years differ from the dates of other fiscal years.
- Some fiscal years use a different number of posting periods.
If one year of a fiscal year variant has fewer posting periods than the others, it is called a shortened fiscal year. This variant could be required if closing has to be carried out before the end of the normal fiscal year. For example, in a case where the beginning of the fiscal year needs to be changed or if the company was sold. Before defining the period dates, you must define the shortened fiscal year and the number of posting periods in it. For a shortened fiscal year, you can only assign a lower number of posting periods.