Posting 

Purpose

The main benefit of SEM Business Consolidation lies in the postings that are automatically generated by the system. Automatic postings let you achieve a high degree of automation, enabling the efficient creation of consolidated financial statements.

In isolated cases, you may want to enhance the automatic postings with manual postings. It is also often necessary to manually post adjustment entries to the financial data reported by the consolidation units to meet corporate requirements.

For this reason, the consolidation system offers both automatic and manual posting functions for carrying out your consolidation tasks.

Features

The following tasks generate postings in the system and, thus, update the totals records in the corresponding InfoCube:

·         Adjustments to reported financial data

·         Standardizing entries

·         Interunit elimination

·         Elimination of interunit profit/loss in inventory

·         Consolidation of investments

·         Reclassification

·         Allocation

You can display the totals records with the List of Totals Records.

These tasks also generate documents (also called journal entries), which are written to the ODS object for documents. The journal entries document all changes to the values in the database. This lets you reconstruct at any time all of the changes that were made to the original reported financial data of the consolidation units in order to arrive at the consolidated data.

The following tasks do not post journal entries, but rather update the values in the InfoCube for the totals data.

·        Collection of reported financial data

·        Currency translation

·        Balance carryforward

You can use list of journal entries to verify the value changes.

The following illustration shows the correlation between:

·         the customizing settings required for the postings

·         the journal entry itself

·         the totals records and journal entries generated by the posting

 

The following table explains the relationships shown in the illustration, with the distinction between automatic postings and manual postings.

	Automatic Posting		Manual Posting
Customizing of the Task	e.g., for interunit elimination		e.g., for manual adjustment entries
	Assignment of a consolidation frequency, a document type, and a method (if applicable)
Customizing of the Document Type	Automatic Posting indicator		Manual Posting indicator
	Settings for posting level, balance check, business application, currency, number range, treatment of subassignments, and so on
	Assignment of a number range for document numbers
Customizing of the Method	The method settings control exactly how the system generates postings. For example: In a method for interunit elimination you define which groups of items are cleared with each other.		(not applicable)
Customizing of Selected Items	The system generates automatic line items for financial statement balancing adjustments in both automatic and manual postings. You define selected items to be used for these automatic line items.
Posting	You execute the task in the consolidation monitor or in the workbench.
	The system creates and posts the entries automatically.		In the manual posting transaction you enter the document header data and the line items, and you execute the posting.
Data	At the same time, the system writes data records ·         to an InfoCube for journal entries (ODS object) ·         to an InfoCube for totals records You can display a list of the journal entries and totals records in the consolidation monitor or in the workbench. You can also use BW reports to analyze both InfoCubes.
Reversal	Reversal or deletion of documents that were automatically posted is only possible by repeating the consolidation task.	Options: ·        Reverse individual documents ·        Run a mass reversal

You should use automatic postings to perform the tasks whenever possible to take advantage of the built-in features available for the consolidation process.