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Creating Account Groups to Maintain General Ledger Accounts

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to create account groups for general ledger accounts

Account Groups

A chart of accounts contains different types of accounts and you can arrange these accounts into different account groups. For example, multiple accounts can be grouped in the following ways:

Cash accounts
Material accounts
Asset accounts
P&L statement accounts

By assigning a number range to an account group, you can ensure that accounts of the same type are within the same number range. The numbers of the account group intervals can overlap.

Note

Before creating accounts in the chart of accounts, you must create account groups. You can then use these account groups to perform the following actions:

Create group accounts of the same type, such as material, reconciliation, and P&L statement.
Control the number ranges of G/L accounts.
Control the field status (screen layout) of the company code segment of the G/L account.

This graph shows the account groups for G/L accounts that manage the number ranges and the field status for the company code fields.

Field Status of General Ledger Accounts

The field status enables you to control the display and maintenance of the master data of an account. You can set any one of the following as the status of a field:

Status	Chart of Accounts Assignment
Suppress	For fields that you do not use
Display	For fields whose values must not be changed
Required Entry	For fields in which you must enter a value
Optional Entry	For fields that can contain an entry, but are not required.

The slide shows fields of the company segment that are managed by the field status of the accounts group. The status available are: hidden, display, required or optional entry.

Fields are grouped by SAP S/4HANA. You can set a common field status for all fields of a group. For example, you can set a status for the interest calculation indicator, interest cycle, and last interest calculation key date fields. The Account currencyand Field status group fields are always the required entry fields. The status for these fields cannot be changed.

Note

Even suppressed fields may contain values that still take effect.

You can use one of the following options to control the field status:

Account group-specific
Transaction-specific

The graph depicts how the status of the field depends on the account group used and on the transaction used to access the field.

The field status is generally controlled by the account group. You usually only use transaction-specific controls to specify what can be edited when changing master data. There may be instances when you do not want specific fields to be modified by anyone after the master record has been created. For example, you set the currency of your cash account G/L Accounting under Define Screen Layout for Each Transaction → _Change assign the status Displayto the relevant field.

For each field, SAP S/4HANA takes the field status definitions from the account group and the transaction into consideration and uses the one with a higher priority. The following order applies in SAP S/4HANA, with decreasing priority:

Suppress
Display
Required Entry
Optional Entry

Fields accessed through the transaction Display Master Datacan be either displayed or hidden because you cannot make an entry in a Displaytransaction. If you do not want to use the transaction-specific control, then you can set the field status for all fields to Optional. The Optionalfield status has the lowest priority, so the account group-specific control is always used to define the field status.

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