Describing Transactions

Diagram showing the allocation to internal transactions in SAP. Transactions explain the business transaction, upon which the posting of document line item is based.

The transaction is a combination of a main transaction and a subtransaction.

The description explains the business transaction and is available in all correspondence.

The main transaction controls the determination of the receivables and payables accounts.

The subtransaction controls the determination of the revenue accounts and the tax code.

The subtransaction controls the determination of additional account assignments as well (business area, CO accounting).

FI-CA and industry-specific versions use internal main transactions and sub transactions that are assigned internally by various business processes and that control these processes. These internal transactions are assigned to the installation-specific transactions.

If all FI-CA functions or industry solution functions are used, internal transactions represent the minimum of transactions. In addition to this, for manual posting, you can maintain any number of transactions that do not correspond to internal transactions.

Transactions in FI-CA must be specified by characteristics, such as the debit/credit indicator, interest key, statistical key and so on. These characteristics are automatically transferred to the document during posting.

A table displays the allocation of External and Internal Transactions. Internal Main and Sub Transactions are used by default in the system. External Main and Sub Transactions are used in the parameterization table and can be renamed by the user.

Internal transactions are those transactions that take place in FI-CA and its industry-specific versions. The main examples of these transactions are charges, interests, clarifications, and payments. The allocated external main and sub transactions provide the parameters needed to post these internal transactions.

You have to assign each internal main and sub transaction to an external transaction, even if you have decided not to rename the transactions. In this case, you have to make identical entries in the fields for external assignment.

You should not delete internal main and sub transactions as they are fixed in SAP programs.

Main and sub transactions are used to identify items based on their type (charge, interest) and the process from which they originated (payment, account statement).

This function links each item to a main transaction to which multiple sub transactions are assigned. For example, there's a main transaction Charge with assigned sub transactions Dunning Charge, Return Charge, and Installment Plan Charge.

Diagram showing the External Transactions Parametrization.

All postings in FI-CA contain information about the underlying main and sub transactions.

You can define new entries in this table for use in transactions not defined as internal to FI-CA. These additional transactions are used in general ledger account determination.

You can assign additional attributes to the new transactions. These attributes are copied to the business partner item when the posting is made and influence the business transaction:

Description of line item in the account balance display
Manual posting indicator
Debit/credit indicator
Payment lock
Interest lock
Dunning lock
Dunning procedure

A table displaying various transaction categories: Transactions Clearing, Transactions Invoice CI, Transactions Invoice SD, and Transactions Other Posting, each with their respective main and sub transactions.

If documents that do not have any business partner items (payments) are cleared themselves (by reversal or clearing reset), you can use posting areas 1090 and 1091 to use the original clearing reason to determine the transactions.

In this case, the system automatically creates a business partner item to which the clearing information can be written.

You can use posting area 8121 to determine the transactions for Convergent Invoicing (CI) invoicing documents on several characteristics such as billable item type (recurring fee, usage).

You can use posting area 1200 to determine the transactions for Sales & Distribution (SD) invoicing documents on several characteristics such as billing type, item category, and account assignment group.

You can specify subtransactions for business processes that are not represented in FI-CA. These subtransactions are allocated to the freely defined main transactions. This enables you to model infrequent transactions and use them for manual posting.

Diagram explaining the rule that No allocation is possible in the following cases: user-defined transactions for manual postings exist but they don't correspond to an internal transaction, the 1:1 allocation of an internal transaction to external transaction is not sufficient, and the business process is to be configured individually by defining user-specific transactions.

In the following cases, it's not necessary to allocate external to internal transactions:

If user-defined transactions like other receivables for manual postings do not correspond to internal transactions (6000/0010 in the training system).
Depending on the charge schedule selected in the dunning steps of a dunning procedure, dunning charges are to be posted either statistically or as relevant for the general ledger (1:n allocation).
Depending on the billable item type, you can derive external main and sub transactions in posting area 8121. So, it's possible to allocate different revenue accounts to different revenue origins (recurring fee, usage) in SAP Convergent Invoicing.