Explaining the Basic Concepts of Postings and Documents

Jill has just joined the Global Inc. accounting department. But – who is Jill? Let’s look at what Jill says about herself:

Let's have a look how Jill finds the solution to this issue.

Financial accounting must fulfill external requirements, which include legal restrictions such as the creation of balance sheets and profit and loss statements. The General Ledger Accounting (G/L) is the core within the SAP system (Financial area) solution and stores the information needed to create a balance sheet and a profit and loss (P&L) statement.

The system records all business transactions according to the document principle, which provides an unbroken audit trail from the financial statements to the individual documents.

The recordings are saved in the form of an accounting document.

For example, you get a vendor invoice. This invoice is posted as a financial document in Financial Accounting. A bank statement was sent from one of your house banks. The individual items of the bank statement are entered as a journal entry in Financial Accounting.

For good complete reporting, it is important to have the data stored as uniformly as possible in the system. In the SAP System, this central place of data provisioning is the so-called Universal Journal. With this single source of truth, companies can rely on the numbers and can always trace back to the source document.

The central table ACDOCA is updated by the entry of postings in G/L accounting. These postings can be made directly in the general ledger and thus supply ACDOCA directly with data. They can also be transferred indirectly to the general ledger via postings in other areas.

The following slide shows different ways how FI documents can be entered to the system (ACDOCA/Universal Journal).

1. G/L: Manual input from the G/L accounting clerk

   Example: Posting of a capital increase or a cash transfer from petty cash to the bank

2. AP/AR: Manual input from the AP/AR accounting clerk

   Example: Execution of a customer transfer posting or vendor credit memo

3. Recurring Entries/Accrual Engine: Automatic input by recurring entries/accrual engine

   Example: Rental costs, insurance expenses or automatic input by use of the accrual engine

4. Automatic Input from interfaces or other parts of FI

   Examples:

   • Logistic Modules (Materials Management (MM), Sales and Distribution (SD, ...)
   • Postings from the automatic bank statement program
   • Vendor invoices, credit memos (AP)
   • Customer Invoices, credit memos (AR)

The documents entered in the system then flow into the balance sheet and P&L and form the figures displayed there. For traceability, it is very important that a direct analysis of the individual journal entries entered can be carried out from the aggregated figures. If auditors require verification of individual balance sheet items, the facts can be traced down to the document level.

For SAP users in the financial area, it is very helpful to be able to navigate directly from the balance sheet display to the document level, if analysis is required. From the balance sheet, you can navigate to the line-item display and then to the document level. Here you can see additional information such as document text, user, entry date and time.

During this course, different ways to retrieve a financial document are shown. Let's start with the first way: Navigate from Balance Sheet to FI document.