You have been hired at the Bike Company SE, an international group, as a consolidation expert.
Among your tasks is to support the consolidation end users in the group closing activities of your consolidation department.
The Bike Company recently implemented SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting and everyone is adjusting to the concepts of the new Group Reporting software.
We assume you already know the fundamentals of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting and now want to deepen your knowledge.
Note
- SAP offers a cloud product SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting and an on-premise solution. SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting. This course covers both and you can assume all functionality described is equivalent for both.
- If you are completely new to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting, please check the introductory learning journey.
Consolidation Version
A Consolidation Version makes it possible to identify and consolidate different sets of financial data or consolidate in different group currencies.
For example, you might have separate parallel versions to fulfill different reporting needs, such as actual data for publishing official reports, planning and forecast data for internal evaluation, restated reporting data for an accounting change, and simulation data for a what-if scenario.
A Consolidation Version has the following dual purpose in SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting:
Data Tracking: Keep track of actual, budget, forecast transaction data.
Special Version: Ability to quickly consolidate data in different ways without having to make redundant configuration.
Group currency determination: The Group Currency is defined by version.
In the Consolidation Version, you define from which FI accounting ledger the Financial close data of an integrated S/4HANA company will be copied when the Release Universal Journal task is executed in the data monitor.
Restatements: consolidation versions can be set up to perform prior-period restatements.
Simulations: consolidation versions can be set up to perform currency simulations e.g. translate last period values with current period exchange rates.
Multiple group currencies: consolidation versions can be set up to record multiple group currencies simultaneously.
Version-dependent master data: consolidation unit and financial statement item master data can be time-dependent to allow tracking changes through time.
Version-dependent configuration: configuration objects can be version-dependent to allow for plan vs. actual currency translation for example
Separate actual vs. plan data in ACDOCU: consolidation versions are used to separate actual vs. plan transaction data as well US GAAP actual vs. IFRS actual for example.
Source data in ACDOCP: Plan data is stored in categories in table ACDOCP. Group Reporting stores data like actual data, plan data etc. in consolidation versions. So a mapping between a plan category and a consolidation version is necessary, if plan data has to be used in group reporting.
The main group reporting consolidation version is a standard version that is required.
If restatements and simulations are needed, additional extension versions can be used.
If additional group currencies are needed, additional group currency extension versions can be used.
Special Versions
Some configuration settings depend on versions. When you make these settings, they are stored internally as so-called special versions. These special versions can be assigned to one or more consolidation versions in parallel.
Following this concept, special versions allow you to use existing configuration settings in several consolidation versions and thus, reduce the time required to set the system up for new queries and avoid redundant data.
As an example, consolidation versions for actual data and planning data can use different exchange rates special versions
