Business areas are primarily used to facilitate external segment reporting across company codes, covering the company's main areas of operation (product lines, branches).

You can assign all balance sheet items, such as fixed assets, receivables, payables and material stock, as well as the entire P&L statement directly to business areas. You can only assign banks, equity, and taxes manually to business areas if you do this indirectly. For this reason, it is not possible to create the legally-required financial statements and tax reports at business area level. Financial statements at business area level are therefore only suitable for use in internal reporting.

To be able to create a balance sheet and/or P&L statement, the data has to be updated in the general ledger transaction figures for each business area. There are two different procedures for doing this:

• When posting the original document, the system supplies the business area with the correct information.

The following documentation explains how you set the business area in accounting documents created by accounting transactions from individual SAP applications. In addition, it shows the steps necessary for creating a business area balance sheet and/or P/L statement.