Accounting Concepts and Functionality

Accounting fields are used to define your organization's financial objects that can be affected by transactions and are used for many business purposes. The most common use of accounting fields is by your general Ledger in your ERP.

Here are some common examples of accounting fields.

Within guided buy your accounting fields can be used to determine your approval flows, check budgets and drive the journal entries in the back-end system.

• Accounting fields specify the organizational and financial entities that are affected by a transaction.
• Examples of Accounting Fields:
  • Companies, Business Units, Cost Centers, Departments, GL Accounts, Project Codes, Product Codes, Regions
• Accounting can:
  • Determine approval workflows based on cost center
  • Check against a Project or Account budget
  • Drive journal/ledger entries in the ERP after a payment is approved

Accounting fields are used for many business purposes. They are usually used by the general ledger in your ERP system.

Accounting fields are set at the line item level of your transaction.

Each line item can have its own set of accounting and users can view accounting detail by using the dropdown menu on the line item.

The accounting information will stay with that transaction throughout the entire process but can be revised at any time if needed.

• Accounting is assigned at the line-item level
  • Clicking the dropdown menu on a line item allows you to access the Accounting details
  • Each requisition line can have a different set of accounting
• The accounting assigned on a requisition remains on that transaction as it flows through system
  • Requisition→Purchase Order→Invoice→Payment Request
  • Accounting can be changed as needed during the transaction flow

Accounting in the SAP Ariba Procurement System is extremely flexible. You can use accounting fields to record departments, cost centers, accounts, projects, or any category supported by your general ledger or ERP systems.

We just saw that each individual line item can have its own accounting.

But you can also split your accounting across different cost centers etc within an individual line item.

For each split you will specify the percentage of the amount using either a percentage quantity or dollar amount.

• You can split a line-item’s accounting for allocation across multiple entities
  • Use the Split Accounting link in the line item Accounting details to split a line item across multiple Cost Centers, Accounts, Projects, or Departments
  • Impacts the budget of each specified entity
• Specify a percentage of the line-item amount for each accounting field
  • For example: 60% Marketing and 40% Legal
  • Must total to 100%

Your company's accounting configuration is extremely flexible, and you only need to use the fields that are defined in your ERP, which again is the source of truth for your data.

To complete your accounting fields, you can use the drop-down list of preloaded values.

Another benefit is by defaulting some of your data so you will not have to fill in all of your accounting fields. However, you can change any fields if necessary.

You can base your defaulting on commodity codes. For example, anytime you order office supplies, they can be defaulted to a particular account or they can be defaulted based on the requester and will be assigned to a specific cost center.

• Your organization does not need to use all available accounting fields
  • Use the ones that are used by your ERP systems
• Data values for accounting fields are loaded from the ERP, which is the "source of truth"
• To fill out accounting fields, users select from lists of these preloaded values

Your ERP is the source of truth regarding accounting field names and allowed values. The SAP Ariba Procurement Solution loads these names and values and then allows users to select them when specifying accounting in requisitions.