Maintain fiscal year variant (maintain shortened fisc. year)

You can define the following characteristics for a fiscal year variant:

• how many posting periods a fiscal year has.

• how many special periods you need.

• how the system is to determine the posting periods when posting.

When defining your fiscal year, you have the following options:

• Your fiscal year is the calendar year

In this case, you must only select the Calendar year field.

• Your fiscal year deviates from the calendar year and is not related to the calendar year

In this case, you first enter the number of your posting periods in the Number posting per. field. Via Goto -> Periods, you reach a screen where you can define your posting periods. Here, you specify the month and the day of the period-end and the period in each case.

• Your fiscal year deviates from calendar year and is related to the calendar year

Enter the number of your posting periods into the field Number posting periods and select the field year-dependent. Via Goto -> Periods , you reach a window where you must enter the calendar year for which you want to define your variant. You then reach a screen where you can define your posting periods again.

It is also possible to determine names for the periods of a year-unrelated fiscal year via Edit-> Period texts . A three-character abbreviation (Jan, Feb, Mar...) and a 20-character long text (January, February, March) can be specified.

Standard settings

The following fiscal year variants are created in the standard system:

• Variants in which the fiscal year is the same as the calendar and has up to four special periods

• Variants for shortened fiscal years. For more information on shortened fiscal years, see "Defining shortened fiscal years".

• Variants for non-calendar fiscal years:

• April to March with four special periods

• July to June with four special periods

• October to September with four special periods

• Variants that are set up on a weekly basis. These variants can only be used in the Special Purpose Ledger application.

Activities

1. Check the standard fiscal year variants.

2. You might have to change the available variants or create your own variants.

Defining shortened fiscal year

A shortened fiscal year is a fiscal year having less than twelve months, but for which a year-end closing must be generated. The definition of a shortened fiscal year is always year-dependent, since it represents a year-related exception. You must always define an entire calendar year when defining a fiscal year variant. The year-related fiscal year variant therefore contains not only the periods from the shortened fiscal year, but also other periods from the previous or upcoming fiscal year.

There are two ways to define a shortened fiscal year:

• If you use the Financial Accounting without Asset Accounting setup, you can begin a fiscal year with any period.

Example

If your shortened year goes from January to September, you can allocate periods 004 to 012 . Allocate periods 001 to 003 of the new fiscal year to the months October-December.

Specify the number of periods for the fiscal year variant (12 in the example above).

Note

Keep in mind that the last period of a fiscal year must correspond to the number of periods in that year. This means that if you want to define 12 periods, the last period in that year must be number 12.

• If you employ the Asset Accounting module, each fiscal year must begin with period number 001 , to allow asset depreciation calculations to be carried out accurately.

For a fiscal year variant, specify the periods and the number of periods the shortened fiscal year has. This way, each fiscal year of the variant can begin with period 001.

Example

If you define a fiscal year with twelve periods, it can contain a shortened year with nine periods (from 001 to 009). The remaining calendar year, then, contains the first three periods of the new fiscal year (periods 001 to 003).

Any other specifics on use of the Asset Accounting system can be found in the Asset Accounting documentation.

Note

You define your shortened year and the following normal fiscal years under the same fiscal year variant. Keep in mind that you need to ensure that posting to prior periods in previous fiscal years must still be possible.

You need to keep the year-dependent fiscal year variants if you will still be posting in or before a shortened fiscal year or if you are transferring old data from this period. You cannot define year- independent fiscal year variants until the shortened fiscal year is closed (from the accounting perspective), with no further adjustment postings expected.

Year-dependent definitions will be deleted as soon as you convert the fiscal year variants from year-dependent to -independent.

Standard settings

Two shortened fiscal year variants are shipped with the standard system: variant R1 for a Financial Accounting shortened year, and variant AM for shortened years when Asset Accounting is in use.

Activities

1. If you need to define a shortened fiscal year, first determine which of the two named options will be used.

2. Define the shortened fiscal year.

To define the shortened year for Asset Accounting, select Edit -> Shortened fisc.yr ->Display/Define from the menu.