Describing the Structure of a Document and Identifying Some of the Most Relevant Control Elements of Record to Report Postings

As Jill has discovered that each financial document contains a wealth of information, she is keen to understand their structure and outline their key elements. She particularly needs to determine the most important elements needed to be correctly entered to ensure that, in the end, the subsequent accounting reporting will meet the standards of Global Inc.

Let's look at the structure of a posted FI document in SAP.

Now let's look at the document header and the line items of a posted FI document in a little more detail.

Let's take a closer look at some important fields in the document header and in the line items of a posted FI document.

Jill's colleague Tom uses two examples to explain the problems that can be created by incorrect entries posted in the system.

Many reports must be created regularly in Financial Accounting, for example, on a monthly basis. To ensure that the documents entered can be correctly assigned to the individual reporting periods during the evaluations, a certain field must contain exactly this information. For financial accounting documents, this is the posting date. The entry in this field determines the reporting period in which the document values are included. Let me explain more in detail:

Correctly entered data in documents is a prerequisite for meaningful reporting and business processes.

Normally, only the posting periods that are currently required for postings are open and post-able in the SAP system. This is usually the current month and, if necessary, the previous and/or the following month.

Each financial accounting document is assigned to a certain type of business transaction by means of a journal entry type. Either the journal entry type is proposed automatically by the system when FI documents are entered, or the user enters or changes it manually.

The journal entry type is often used in reporting as a characteristic for identifying certain transactions. Due to the selection of an unsuitable journal entry type in the posted document, documents may be missing in evaluations or may be displayed incorrectly in reports.

In the general ledger, journal entry types are used for postings. However, journal entry types are also required for postings that originate from customer, vendor, or asset accounting.

In addition, the journal entry type is often used as a search criterion. For example: If you want an overview of the given customer credit memos, you search for documents with the journal entry type customer credit memo.

This means that if a customer credit memo is incorrectly posted with the journal entry type DR (customer invoice) instead of DG (customer credit memo), this document would be missing in the evaluation, or other reporting would not be correct.

For this reason, it is important that the correct journal entry types are proposed by the system as automatically as possible and that the users know exactly when they have to change them.