Specify Primary Finance Settings
The partner lead configuration expert selects the Fiscal Year Variant and Group Currency, which is applied to the entire system and cannot be changed after saving.
The Fiscal Year Variant (FYV) defines the relationship between the calendar year and the fiscal year. This selection defines how the system determines the posting period to assign when posting a journal entry. In Accounting, you can have a fiscal year with a maximum of 16 posting periods, including special periods. The same FYV applies to your entire system with all its ledgers and company codes.
The Group Currency is the global currency that is applied to the entire system. A group currency allows you to compare amounts from different company codes in their respective currencies against one, overarching currency. You can define the currency for each company code and ledger in the Product-Specific Configuration phase with the configuration activity, Define Currency Settings for Ledgers and Company Codes.
Find additional details about Finance in this SAP Blog: What you need to know about Finance in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Set Up Organizational Structure
The organizational structure app will tell you exactly what organizational entities are required in the Units to Create area. SAP Central Business Configuration bases this number of required entities on the activated scope and country/regions. It's also checking to make sure all required relationships are defined between necessary entities. For example, every distribution chain requires at least one plant to be assigned.
There should have been a dedicated Fit-to-Standard workshop just to focus on the customer's required organizational structure. We recommend the partner lead configuration expert conduct this workshop because they complete the majority of the system setup tasks in SAP Central Business Configuration, including building the organizational structure.
Relationships between Organizational Entities
The following types of relationships exist between the units of an organizational structure:
- Tree relation, which is a country-specific parent-child relationship (1:n). For example, Plant to Legal Entity.
- Additional relation, which is a relation of an organizational unit from a country-specific tree to another organizational unit of the same tree or to a global organizational unit. Additional relationships have an n:n cardinality, meaning each of the organizational units for which an additional relationship is possible may have an additional relationship with one or several organizational units.
Local Entities
Local entities are assigned to defined countries, and are the highest level of the organizational structure. Company is the root node and may have one legal entity as child. Under legal entities, you can add these organizational units:
- Sales Organization for Sales & Distribution
- Plant for site logistics
Global Entities
Global entities can be assigned to organizational structures in one or more countries. For example, a Shipping Point can be assigned to several Plants which are in more than one country. You can create the following types of global entities:
- Distribution Channel
- Division
- Purchasing Organization
- Sales Office
- Shipping Point
- Shipping Point for Raw Materials
- Standard Shipping Point
Organizational Structure App Display Views
The Organizational Structure app enables you to create and adapt a company's organizational structure with several different views:
- Graphic view - This view provides guidance by showing entities that can exist under other entities with the title "Create [org entity]". If you click this entity, it opens up a screen to enter the details. This view is most helpful for those who are not familiar with how to use this app in SAP Central Business Configuration, because it effectively coaches you through building the org structure.
- Simplified mode - This is the simplified version of the Graphic view. You still see the visual depiction of each org entity and their relations, but the buttons that guide you through the creation of new org entities in the graphic view are hidden to provide more space on the screen for viewing one or more org structures. This is helpful as you build multiple structures for different countries.
- Table view - All organizational entities are displayed in a list. This may be easiest to manage for more complicated organizational structures for many different countries.
Note
Non-confirmed entities are in the "staging" area, where they can be easily changed or deleted. Make sure you confirm only the units you want to deploy to the back-end system. Once confirmed, the entity cannot be deleted!
When you are finished maintaining the organizational structure, select the Confirm button in the top right corner to confirm the entities, then complete the activity.
Deploy Scope & Organizational Structure Activity
After creating all required organizational entities and confirming them, the partner lead configuration expert can then complete the activity to deploy the scope and organizational structure.
Make changes in earlier phases, if needed
What if you realized there is an additional country/region or business process that needs to be activated? The Edit button in the top right corner of previously completed activities is available for this purpose. SAP Central Business Configuration is a tool used not just during implementation, but also by the customers after go-live to maintain their systems through future releases. For this reason, you have to be able to move forward and backward through the activities.
For example, after a new release, a customer may identify a few business processes they want to activate in their system. They would log into SAP Central Business Configuration, open the activity that needs to be changed and use the Edit button to move the workspace back to the Scope phase to activate the processes for whichever country/regions they choose. Then move forward through the activities to re-confirm, because there are technical consistency checks occurring in the background to ensure everything necessary to support those new processes are also set up.
For example, with a new business process, there may be an additional organizational entity required. If you try to complete the activity to Deploy Scope and Organizational Structure without adding the new org entity, it will tell you a new entity needs to be added before you can move to the next phase. In the Product-Specific Configuration phase, there will likely be additional configuration values that become available and need to have data entered for the business processes to function correctly.
Note
Only some roles have permission to use the Edit button (SAP_CBC_CONSUMPTION_PROGRAM_LEAD and SAP_CBC_CONSUMPTION_PROJECT_LEAD). Certain values cannot be changed after they are confirmed regardless. For example, the primary finance settings and confirmed entities in the organizational structure. Learn more about which roles have access to different functionality in the SAP Help Portal.