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:

  • Decide which accounting principle you want to apply in your leading 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). The leading ledger is integrated with Controlling (CO) 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 the relevant company codes.

    It is also possible to assign the same ledger to different accounting principles in several company codes. For example, you can thereby bundle all local accounting principles of the different countries in one ledger.

    However, you have to ensure that the same accounting principle is not assigned to different ledgers, if they are used in several company codes.

Recommendation Recommendation

We recommend that you implement this parallel ledger approach if the number of G/L accounts would be unmanageable with the approach using additional accounts.

Advantages:

  • In each company code, 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 approach, you can portray different fiscal year variants.

  • The number of G/L accounts is manageable.

Disadvantage:

  • The use of parallel ledgers increases the volume of data.

End of the recommendation.

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 to be made in the components, see the sections on parallel accounting in the application components mentioned above.

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 for which 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 Groups).

  • Ledger Selection

    • Postings for which 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 accounting principle. For the system to determine the ledger to which the posting is made, you need to have defined accounting principles in Customizing and assigned the desired ledger group to each of these accounting principles.

    Recommendation Recommendation

    We recommend that you define a separate document type for the manual postings that only need to be updated in specific ledgers.

    End of the recommendation.

    For more information, see Clearing and Posting Specific to Ledger Groups.

  • Reporting

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

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 as follows: On the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Start of the navigation path Accounting Next navigation step Financial Accounting Next navigation step General Ledger Next navigation step Posting Next navigation step Enter General Posting for Ledger Group End of the navigation path.