Configuring Financial Accounting in SAP ERP

Narayanan Veeriah

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781493217229
• eBook ISBN: 9781493217236
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This is your comprehensive guide to configuring Financial Accounting in SAP ERP! Brush up on the old standbys—Accounts Payable, Account Receivable, SAP General Ledger, and Asset Accounting—and then dive in to Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable, Consolidation, Lease Accounting, Travel Management, SAP Fiori, and much more. You'll learn to set up your enterprise structure, use maintenance tools, and ensure your implementation works for your unique business. SAP General Ledger accounting (SAP G/L)
Accounts Payable (FI-A/P)
Accounts Receivable (FI-A/R)
Bank Accounting (FI-BL)
Asset Accounting (FI-AA)
Travel Management (FI-LA)
Contracts Accounts Receivable and Payable (FI-CA)
Consolidation
SAP Fiori
Case studies

1 Financial Accounting in SAP ERP Financials

You can achieve superior financial performance with Financial Accounting in SAP ERP Financials by accurately managing liquidity and cash, streamlining processes, and reducing costs through a fully integrated and robust, yet flexible, application.

SAP is the market leader in business solutions and provides you with software applications and services to address your unique business needs, whatever industry you’re in.

With the various releases of SAP R/2 and SAP R/3 applications falling short of customers’ increasing expectations in terms of adaptability, flexibility, and scalability, SAP improved offerings in the form of mySAP Enterprise Resource Planning (mySAP ERP) in 2003, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP) in 2005, and finally SAP ERP 6.0 (in 2006), which can now be powered by SAP HANA with the recent release of Enhancement Package 8 (EHP 8).

To teach you more about SAP ERP 6.0 and its components, we’ll provide an overview of SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ERP Financials, and Financial Accounting (FI) in this chapter.

1.1 SAP ERP 6.0

Built on the SAP NetWeaver platform and powered by SAP HANA, SAP ERP 6.0 is a services-enabled ERP solution that offers all future upgrades through enhancement packages aimed at addressing business priorities by implementing the necessary innovations in industry and business solutions faster than ever. Enhancement packages offer you the benefit of improving and extending your existing SAP ERP software without the cost of major upgrades. This means you can leverage, for example, SAP Master Data Governance—delivered via an SAP enhancement package—to help govern financial master data used in consolidation and operational charts of accounts. In the following sections, we will look at some of the key solutions provided by SAP ERP 6.0. We will then discuss some of the changes that were introduced with EHP 8.

1.1.1 Key Functional Solutions

SAP ERP 6.0, a part of the SAP Business Suite, provides you with the power and agility to adapt quickly and effectively to meet your business, market, and industry dynamics. Based on service-oriented architecture (SOA), SAP ERP 6.0 allows companies to actively control the entire administrative and operations environment, as well as increase efficiency and profitability by providing the key functional solutions described in the following subsections and shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Key Functional Solutions in SAP ERP 6.0

SAP ERP Corporate Services

SAP ERP Corporate Services can help you realize meaningful business value by streamlining business processes and controlling costs and risks in the areas of SAP Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) Management, SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), SAP Global Trade Services, SAP Portfolio and Project Management, SAP ERP Quality Management (QM), SAP Real Estate Management, and SAP Travel Management.

SAP ERP Financials

SAP ERP Financials addresses all your financial roles and processes in an integrated way with seamless, end-to-end coverage for operational effectiveness and improved business management. You can use it to meet today’s corporate challenges in the areas of performance management, management reporting, financial effectiveness, local and group closing, and corporate governance. The modular construction using apps enables you to customize the solution and transactions to meet your specific business needs in core accounting (FI), including reporting, financial supply chain management, shared services, and treasury.

SAP ERP Human Capital Management

SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) helps executives, human resources professionals, and line-of-business leaders to forecast, plan, hire the best talent, and train their workforce. Fully integrated and modular, it supports shared services and business process outsourcing that reduces the cost of operations of your business. Using SAP ERP HCM, you can automate end-user service delivery, talent management, workforce deployment, workforce process management, and workforce analytics.

SAP ERP Operations

SAP ERP Operations can be the software backbone of your organization to achieve operational excellence in key business areas, including procurement and logistics execution, product development and manufacturing, and sales and service. You can use this solution to streamline your day-to-day operations to reduce costs, increase revenues, maximize profitability, and improve customer service.

Let’s now look at the enhancements that have been made available through the recent EHP 8 for SAP ERP.

1.1.2 Enhancement Package 8

As we’ve already mentioned, the enhancement packages (released about once every two years with quarterly support packs (SP) or support pack stacks [SPS]) bring in additional and/or improved functionality to your existing SAP ERP system without the hassles of a major upgrade that could otherwise require more time and effort in terms of system downtime, implementation, and so on.

The last enhancement package (EHP 7), released in August 2013, was optimized for both traditional and SAP HANA databases. Continuing with the SAP HANA focus, SAP released EHP 8 for SAP ERP 6.0 in January 2016 by consolidating more than 11 SPs of EHP 7. As with all the enhancement packages, which are always cumulative, EHP 8 (with SPS 8 as of October 2017) contains all the previously delivered functions, along with new innovative and enhanced features for several lines of business (LOBs) such as finance, treasury and risk management, commodity management, procurement, R&D engineering, SAP ERP Plant Maintenance (PM), SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM), and human capital management (SAP ERP HCM), besides the innovations in industry solutions for retail, media, public sector, insurance, oil and gas, and utilities. However, note that EHP 8 isn’t just an update in the sense of an enhancement package; instead, it’s more of an upgrade because the enhancement procedure is now load-based, Unicode only (see Chapter 16 for more de...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Acknowledgments
•   Preface
• 1   Financial Accounting in SAP ERP Financials
• 2   Customizing SAP
• 3   Enterprise Structure
• 4   Global Settings: Company Code Global Parameters
• 5   Global Settings: Documents
• 6   Global Settings: Tax, Inflation Accounting, and Correspondence
• 7   SAP General Ledger Accounting
• 8   Accounts Payable
• 9   Accounts Receivable
• 10   Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable
• 11   Bank Accounting
• 12   Asset Accounting
• 13   Consolidation Preparation
• 14   Lease Accounting
• 15   Travel Management
• 16   SAP Upgrade and Migration
• 17   SAP Fiori
• 18   Maintenance Tools
• The Author
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes