Changeover Procedure in Financial Accounting

Changeover Procedure in Financial Accounting

Use

Technical conversion of local currency takes place at a key date following individual account closing for the fiscal year that was last balanced in national currency. Consolidated financial statements can be drawn up at a later date, independently of this key date. The system changes over the whole local currency dataset in the participating countries' organizational units.

When changing over documents in Financial Accounting, the following steps must be distinguished:

1. Check and analysis of Financial Accounting

2. Conversion of all documents

3. Recreation of account transaction figures for customer, vendor, and G/L accounts of the current fiscal year

4. Determination of opening balance of current fiscal year

a) Accounts managed on an open item basis (G/L accounts, customer accounts, vendor accounts)

b) Reconciliation of balances carried forward in G/L reconciliation accounts

c) Conversion of G/L accounts not managed on an open item basis

d) Reconciliation of opening balance

5. Reconciliation of General Ledger I with General Ledger II

During local currency changeover, the system analyzes problems that have arisen up to this point (in the ANALYZE phase). You must resolve these problems prior to actual changeover. This applies to all subledgers that affect Financial Accounting (FI-AR, FI-AP, FI-AA, MM).

Features

Documents (BSEG & RFBLG)

Report program RFEWUDOC converts all documents present in your system, simultaneously balancing the amounts within the document (all other report programs perform the changeover only).

Additional Data

All other Financial Accounting data is converted by generated report programs that do not perform any form of reconciliation. This means that you must reconcile Financial Accounting following formal changeover of these fields.

Archived Documents

Document archives are not converted and cannot be included for changeover or reconciliation. It follows that documents in the current fiscal year must not be archived prior to local currency changeover.

You can however archive documents belonging to closed fiscal years. Ensure that you do not delete indexes for transactions that were cleared in the current fiscal year since the system requires these indexes for reconciliation purposes.

Balance Audit Trail and Document Journal

The balance audit trail and document journal are both an integral part of correct accounting methods. You must document your year-end closing. You must run the balance audit trail and document journal for your old fiscal year. Following changeover, the system reopens the balance audit trail in a new file on the first day of the current fiscal year, and creates a document journal. Immediately prior to changeover, you should save all your system data so that you can recreate the balance audit trail and document journal if necessary. Following changeover, you can create both these items in euro as from the first day of the current fiscal year.

Notes Regarding Withholding Tax

If withholding tax (as opposed to extended withholding tax) is implemented in your system, the system does not convert amount fields. Following changeover, you need only adjust those statutory threshold values used for calculation in line with the provisions stipulated by the tax authorities (see also the Implementation Guide (IMG)): Financial Accounting ® Financial Accounting Global Settings ® Withholding Tax).

If you have implemented extended withholding tax, the system converts the amount fields, since withholding tax base amounts and withholding tax amounts are managed in local currency within the system. The tables that require conversion are WITH_ITEM, WTAK, and WTAD. whereby the last two tables only apply for withholding tax types with accumulation.

If these withholding tax types are used, rounding differences may lead to the total of individual line items (from the table WITH_ITEM) differing slightly from the corresponding amounts in the totals tables (WTAK, WTAD). For the following transactions, small inaccuracies can arise when calculating withholding tax. These inaccuracies no longer occur once the next accumulation period has started.

To prevent these inaccuracies arising, you should avoid posting any transactions to which withholding tax applies between the time you change over your local currency and the end of the accumulation period following changeover.

Extended withholding tax is predominantly used in Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal.

Checking Local Currency Changeover

To check that local currency changeover took place with no errors, carry out the following tests:

Documents must balance out to zero (corrected by the system in each document). Performance reasons prevent you from being able to start an analysis program that checks whether documents balance out to zero.

Activities

Compare the lists that you printed out in the IMG chapters Enable Revision and Carry Out Revision.

Report program SAPF070 checks the reconciliation of documents with transaction figures (large reconciliation test)

The total of open items must agree with the transaction figures. For accounts managed on an open item basis, these totals can be checked using the following programs:

RFDOPO00	Customer open items
RFDSLD00	Customer balance list
RFKOPO00	Vendor open items
RFKSLD00	Vendor balance list
RFSOPO00	G/L account open items (select open items only)
RFSSLD00	G/L account balance list

The total of customer open items and vendor open items must agree with the balance of the corresponding reconciliation accounts. Compare the results of report programs RFDOPO00 and RFKOPO00 with the results of report program RFSSLD00.

Transaction figures in the G/L accounts must balance to zero in the current fiscal year. You can check these figures using program RFSSLD00.
Use report program RFSSLD00 to check the conversion of G/L account transaction figures that are not managed on an open item basis. Compare the converted balances with the balance lists in the system prior to changeover.
Use report program RFBILA00 to compare the balances prior to and post conversion.
Use report program RFBELJ00 to check the correct conversion of documents both prior to and post changeover.

Changeover Restrictions

Transaction Figures in Closed Fiscal Years

Following the changeover to the euro, transaction figures in closed fiscal years no longer agree with those in the documents.

Balance Carried Forward

Following changeover, you can no longer start the balance carried forward for closed fiscal years.

Parked Documents

Ensure that your system does not contain any parked documents. If parked documents are converted, the Workflow containers (in which document amounts are stored for the release concept) are not automatically converted. Following changeover to the euro, release authorization for the "old" parked documents then takes place using the wrong amounts.

Held Documents

Your system should not contain any held documents. These documents are stored in table RFDT and cannot therefore be accessed by the conversion package.

Payment Runs

The system does not convert payment run tables. Old payment proposals must either be deleted prior to conversion or closed by a payment run and then archived if necessary.

IDOCs and ALE

IDOCs are not converted. If several systems are connected, they must all be converted simultaneously. This also applies to external documents.

Credit Control Area

Credit control area data is converted but no reconciliation takes place. Following local currency changeover, you can reconstruct the data for the credit control area.

Archives

The system does not convert the following archives:

Check archives
Transaction figures
Document archives

Batch Input Sessions

You must have no outstanding batch input sessions.

Dunning and payment runs must be completed and the relevant notices printed prior to changeover. Abgeschlossene Buchungsperioden müssen geschlossen sein.

You can find more information on these topics in documentation for the activity Preparation in Financial Accounting (FI-AP/FI-AR, FI-GL).