Posting Journal Entries to Projects

You want to understand the process to post expenses on projects. You also want to analyze these postings in reports to check their impact. Finally, you have heard terms such as "universal journal", "single-source of truth", "parallel valuations", and "ledgers" and it would be good if you can understand these terms in the context of the SAP S/4HANA system.

During each financial period, as part of the normal business operation, various expenses are incurred. To post them to the general ledger, a G/L account is necessary.

If the expenses were caused by the operating business, a G/L account of the type "Primary costs or revenues" is used.

Any such posting needs to be assigned to a controlling object. In our example, costs for travel to the trade fair in Paris will be posted to the corresponding project, represented by its WBS element.

This posting will create line items in the Universal Journal (table ACDOCA).

After posting, the amount will be displayed in the relevant reports as actual costs and can be verified against the planned costs or the budget.

The actual financial accounting and controlling data is recorded in one single table: the universal journal (technical name: ACDOCA), this table acts as the single source of truth for all actual financial transaction data. This has many advantages compared to the traditional silo approach of separated subsystems.

There are numerous fields loaded from management accounting into the Universal Journal. Among them are the columns, which contain project IDs and the IDs of WBS elements.

As a user, you run reports that extract data from the table. The figure below gives you an impression of some of the fields used to map the posting to a project: You can see the two line items which depict a transfer posting from cost center 10101101 to project PR0000123 for EUR 777:

Financial accounting typically requires keeping your accounting books with multiple parallel valuations, when the reporting authorities demand to report data differently and according to a specific set of rules.

In certain countries like Brazil, inventory needs to be valuated at actual cost according to the Local GAAP. Often, the Local GAAP is tied to the non-leading ledger. Actual cost rates are calculated by ledger. As management accounting knows all ledgers, actual costing can be run per ledger.