Migration in Detail 

Use

The migration seeks to enable you to perform the transition as smoothly as possible from the SAP General Ledger Accounting environment you have been using until now to the diverse range of functions offered by New General Ledger Accounting. It may be that you only want to implement the requirements already represented, such as parallel accounting using the account approach. Or you may want to adjust your accounting representation to new circumstances and therefore switch to new accounting methods, for example by implementing a financial statement at the segment level. In any case, it should remain possible to document the financial statement on the base of line items just as before. It is therefore a matter of wanting to document the changeover for external auditing purposes, for example.

You may opt for the changeover due to one or more changes in how General Ledger Accounting is used, such as the introduction of document splitting, the switch from an account approach to a ledger approach, or the discontinued use of particular ledgers. The necessary information to be documented may already exist as follows:

●     You find the necessary information - if only partially - in accounting documents but you do not evaluate (or have not been able to evaluate) this information for General Ledger Accounting.

Strictly speaking, you do not actually need any new documents because you only need to record the new way of using the document information. An example for this would be the introduction of document splitting by profit centers when you have previously already worked with Profit Center Accounting as a separate function and now want to reflect this in New General Ledger Accounting.

●     You can derive the information from other data stored in accounting documents.

The information that is actually required is therefore not available in posted documents but you can create rules governing how you can derive this information systematically from information contained in documents. You then have to add the derived information to the affected documents before you can perform any other migration steps. An example of this would be the introduction of a segment invoice whereby you can derive the segments from existing profit center information

●     You have to create for a document the necessary information to be documented using an existing reference or one that is yet to be created (such as the invoice reference or the clearing document number) to another document.

As is the case with the derivation of information, you have to create such reference relationships before you perform any other migration steps. To split a partial payment, for example, you may want to use the reference to the relevant invoice.

●     You find the necessary information distributed across a number of documents that you as the user know to be connected but that the system cannot identify as being connected. In the logic of an account model, for example, the system cannot recognize which accounts are combined to produce different financial statements.

Activities

The approach applied in all of these cases is that you first document the relevant documents systematically. You achieve this with the migration worklist containing all migrated documents as well as their migration status.

Migration is therefore more than just a technical necessity for the SAP system. It reflects much more the difference in content between old and new reporting and enables you to clearly represent this changeover in the same way as the other documentation requirements for an accounting system.

However, from the technical standpoint, you may also change a range of functions, especially with the introduction of document splitting. Documents posted before the changeover may meet the new requirements partially or not at all. Documents posted after the changeover must meet the new requirements. However, business processes and consequently the accounting documents that represent them regularly extend across both periods and in this way connect these periods. Nevertheless, you want to ensure that the posting procedure continues as smoothly as possible and that users do not need to ask themselves in the case of each document whether the document was posted before or after the changeover. You certainly do not want check rules to need to be changed regularly between old and new in order to continue processing.

You therefore have to convert technically the documents that belong to business processes and that are still active at the time of the changeover so that, after the changeover, such documents do not come up against new technical requirements and check rules that they do not fulfill.

●     You must classify all business processes uniquely. Coupled with this is the concrete assignment of processes to document types as well as the classification of the chart of accounts

●     The documents within a process must be referenced correctly and in a timely manner by clearing or invoice reference so that derived or inherited information can be forwarded.