Customer Field
Definition
A customer field is a database table field that is created and defined by the customer.
Such fields are therefore not delivered in the SAP standard system.
The inclusion of customer fields has effects across the whole system (as well as across all clients) because customer fields entail repository changes. However, you are not obliged to use these fields in all clients.
Use
The standard delivery already contains many fields (or “dimensions”), such as business area, profit center, and segment. You can also tailor the way these fields are used to your reporting needs. For these fields, SAP provides extensive functions and integrated processes, such as those for the profit center.
Recommendation
You must not use any of the standard fields for alternative purposes just in order to store information in documents and in the totals data from a technical point of view. The reason for this restriction is that, at a later date, you might want to use some of the standard fields that you currently do not use. It would be problematic at the point if you had already used those fields for other purposes.
Nevertheless, the fields contained in the standard delivery might not be sufficient to meet your needs. In such cases, you can consider using fields that you define yourself, referred to as "customer fields".
Note
It is the responsibility of the customer to establish the correct portrayal of the content of the customer fields (such as how the fields are filled and analyzed).
In Financial Accounting, you can include customer fields in the coding block. In this way, you can broaden the scope of new General Ledger Accounting by adding new customer fields and by combining such fields with the existing standard fields. This enables you to adapt the information in new General Ledger Accounting to the specific reporting requirements of your company.
However, you ought to give careful consideration to whether you want to use customer fields and to how you want to define them. The number of customer fields you create is also of significance because the fields need to be filled or enriched when documents are entered or transferred. In addition to manual postings, this concerns automatic postings in particular, as well as postings that are made via interfaces. Therefore, taking into account how fields are filled and how they are used in reporting, you should consider if and when using customer fields is really beneficial.
Customer fields can be used in the following ways:
As product-related or activity-related characteristics
Examples:
Vehicle categories: Medium-sized, luxury, small
Product group: Electrical appliances, tools, spare parts
Product groups: New cars, second-hand cars, leased cars
Characteristics for maintenance work (part of production)
Characteristics for customer services (part of service activities)
Organizational or managerial characteristics
Examples:
Regions: Europe, America, Asia
Characteristics for specific business/company areas: Locations and similar, provided such areas cannot be covered by profit centers or cost centers
Characteristics due to industry or legal requirements
Example: Contract types or other contract characteristics in the area of insurance and financial services
Customer fields are usually used for analyzing information at an aggregated level. In this way, the number of characteristic values is usually manageable. Moreover, customer fields can also be used to assign specific documents or line items to a customer-specific characteristic. In such cases, you might not need to assign the complete document volume, but just selected posting data. In the most basic case, a customer field is used for storing structured information that is not stored in the standard fields.
Recommendation
You generally consider using a customer field if you want to use it with values combined freely with the account assignments in standard fields and if it proves indispensable for reporting at the document level and/or the totals record level.
Note
Although it is possible to differentiate G/L accounts instead of using customer fields, this solution has drawbacks. It leads to redundant G/L accounts and consequently inflates the coding block. In any case, such a solution is generally not acceptable because it could also cause problems if you use the frequently deployed account approach for parallel accounting, thereby making the additional differentiation of accounts necessary.
For information on how to create customer fields, see Customizing Settings for Customer Fields.
Restrictions on Using Customer Fields
Note the following restrictions:
Restrictions Related to the Accounting Concept
From the perspective of the accounting concept you use, the main prerequisite for the use of customer fields is that the reporting requirements are based on the information in General Ledger Accounting. You can use balance sheet items or individual accounts, for example, to valuate stocks, receivables, payables, or even financial statement items on the basis of specific criteria. Ultimately, it has to be possible to assign financial accounting documents or items. It is not useful to deploy customer fields in Financial Accounting for purely logistic requirements if sales by product groups or customer groups, for example, are available as a central part of sales processing or purchasing in the respective valuations throughout Logistics and the Logistics Information System. Alternatively, you can create these reports at an aggregated level in the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI). The inclusion of customer fields is not intended to replace Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) either. The use of customer fields in General Ledger Accounting should relate closely to the specific information needs or business requirements in Financial Accounting.
The use of customer fields should therefore not replace these standard scenarios. If, for example, you want to perform segment reporting in accordance with US GAAP or IFRS/IAS, you should use the Segment
field, which is designed for this purpose. New General Ledger Accounting enables you to combine customer fields with the available standard fields so that you can, for example, create P&L statements by profit center and special criteria within your company.
Technical Restrictions
The inclusion of customer fields does not automatically affect or trigger subsequent process in the SAP standard system. From the perspective of Financial Accounting, it is conceivable that certain actions (such as the creation of correspondence or informing designated employees or departments within the company) are triggered by values being entered in customer fields. You could implement such subsequent processes separately (if necessary) in the relevant application, potentially using enhancements or workflows.
The SAP standard delivery does not foresee the fixed assignment of master data in Financial Accounting (G/L accounts, vendors, customers, bank master records, assets in FI-AA) to specific characteristic values in customer fields so that these values can be included in the transfer during posting to financial accounting documents. Provided you do not want to fill your customer fields manually during entry, you can use user exits to fill them automatically on the basis of individual rules. For this, note that customer fields do not form part of the subledgers for customers, vendors and assets. This means that, in the coding block, you can only assign customer fields to G/L account items (accounts for financial statements). Therefore, the customer fields in Financial Accounting cannot be used for open item accounting (accounts receivable, accounts payable). However, you can use enhancements to include customer fields in the master data. Nevertheless, such fields are not customer fields from the coding block perspective.
Recommendation
Note that customer fields can significantly increase the data volume in the totals table. For this reason, before you use customer fields productively in the totals table in new General Ledger Accounting, you should ensure that the data volume in the totals table does not attain a critical level. For more information, see SAP Note 820495. Consequently, you should only include in the totals table customer fields that you essentially need. You cannot include any fields in the totals table if they have the potential of acquiring a very large number of characteristic values. You should only use such fields as coding block fields in the document. We therefore strongly recommend defining the possible characteristic values of a customer field in the form of a customer-specific value table (check table).
It is not possible to use standard means to delete a customer field once it has been created.
Structure
For more information about the data structure, see Data Structure for Customer Fields.
Integration
For information about filling customer fields (automatic derivation or manual posting), see Integration: Filling Customer Fields.