Portrayal Using Parallel Ledgers 

Use

In General Ledger Accounting, you can perform parallel accounting by running several parallel ledgers (general ledgers) for different accounting principles. During posting, you can post data to all ledgers, to a specified selection of ledgers, or to a single ledger:

The data required according to the accounting principle for the consolidated financial statements is managed in the leading ledger of the general ledger (see also Ledgers). This leading ledger is integrated with all subsidiary ledgers and is updated in all company codes. This means that it is automatically assigned to all company codes.

For each additional (parallel) accounting principle, create an additional (non-leading) ledger in General Ledger Accounting.

SAP recommends that you implement this parallel ledger approach if the number of general ledger accounts would be unmanageable for the scenario using additional accounts.

Advantages:

·        You manage a separate ledger for each accounting principle.

·        You can use standard reporting for the leading ledger and all other parallel ledgers.

·        With this solution scenario, you can portray different fiscal year variants.

·        The number of general ledger accounts is manageable.

Disadvantage:

(1)     The use of parallel ledgers increases the volume of data.

Integration

You can post to the parallel ledgers from various different SAP application components:

Financial Accounting (FI)

Asset Accounting (FI-AA)

Treasury and Risk Management (TRM)

Controlling (CO)

Materials Management (MM)

Prerequisites

To portray parallel accounting using parallel ledgers, you have to make various settings in Customizing.

For information about the general settings, see Defining and Assigning Accounting Principles.

For information about the settings in the components, see the documentation for parallel accounting in the listed application components.

Features

You can use the following functions for your parallel ledgers:

Complete ledger

Parallel ledgers are always managed as complete ledgers. This means that all postings where there are no valuation differences are posted to the leading and the non-leading ledgers in each company code.

Ledger group

You can combine any number of ledgers in a ledger group. In this way, you simplify the tasks in the individual functions and processes of General Ledger Accounting. This means that you can enter a posting for several ledgers simultaneously (see also Ledger Group).

Ledger selection

·        Postings where no ledger or ledger group is specified are always updated in all ledgers.

·        In the case of manual valuation postings, you can enter the ledger group. This posting is then only updated in the ledgers contained in this ledger group.

·        Documents created by automatic valuations, such as the foreign currency valuation and currency translation, contain the account assignment Accounting Principle. You can assign this account assignment to a ledger group and thereby control in which ledgers this posting is to be updated.

SAP recommends that you define a separate document type for the manual postings that are only to be updated in specific ledgers.

Reporting

For reporting, you can use the following tools in this approach:

·        Drilldown Reporting

·        Report Painter/Report Writer

·        To create financial statements, you can use the report Financial Statements(RFBILA00) for all ledgers.

Activities

The system performs all postings automatically according to the Customizing setting made.

Manual Postings:

You can post manual postings that are only relevant for one individual ledger using the following function in General Ledger Accounting:

From the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Accounting ® Financial Accounting ® General Ledger ® Posting ® Enter General Posting for Ledger Group.