The business area is a separate business unit capable of producing its own financial statements. Internal financial statements are not subject to the same requirements as published financial statements. Fulfilling these requirements for internal financial statements would involve unnecessary work, since this not required for internal reporting.

To be able to generate business area financial statements, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled:

• First, you need to assign G/L account line items to business areas. This is not always possible during document entry, for example, when posting to the reconciliation accounts for payables or receivables.

• The data must have been updated in the general ledger transaction figures for each business area and financial statement item.

• The overall balance must be zero for each business area (only for the balance sheet).

The SAP System provides two separate standard functions for carrying out the activities stated above for balance sheet and P&L accounts.

The basic prerequisite is to ensure that the business area balance sheet function is activated for the company codes in question in the IMG. This guarantees, among other things, that all master records for which it is relevant are linked to a business area; the data is then automatically posted to this business area.