Validation of Totals Data

Validation of Reported Financial Data, Standardized Financial Data, and Consolidated Data

Validation of this data uses validation rules, which you can define in Customizing. To do this, you establish selection conditions (typically with items and subitems), which you can then use in a formula. The system then tests whether the validation rule is true for a given data set.

You can also perform multilevel checks: First, the data is checked using a Boolean expression you have defined (prerequisite). Depending on whether this check is true or false, the system can do one of the following:

Validation of Additional Financial Data

Validation of additional financial data uses validation rules that are predefined and fixed in the system. The predefined fixed messages can be output either as error messages or warning messages.

Validation of Documents

When validating documents, you can choose whether to check the header, the line items, or the entire document. The document header contains fields whose values apply equally to all line items, in addition to general additional fields.

Whereas validation of totals data examines highly aggregated data (such as net sales per quarter), validation of documents focuses on individual line items of documents. Here you can define validation rules that correlate the characteristic values and key figure values within a given data row and check their plausibility.

You define validation rules and messages in the same way as you do for the validation of totals data. Whereas validation of totals data generates a detailed log, validation of documents generates only a list of the messages that occurred during the validation.

Use of BI Aggregates

To improve the performance of task execution, you can have the validation use the aggregates contained in the totals data InfoCube. For the use of aggregates to be feasible, a validation method should have selections for only a few characteristics of the totals data InfoCube. This is normally the case. For the other characteristics, the validation method aggregates the values contained in the InfoCube. For characteristics that do not appear in the definition of a validation method, the system can use aggregates that already exist in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI). Accelerated performance is achieved through the reduced volume of data that the method needs to read.

Validation uses existing aggregates automatically, provided these aggregates contain all of the characteristics required for the validation. To find out which characteristics are required, choose List of Characteristics in Customizing for the validation method. The system displays a list of the characteristics required to use aggregates. The types of characteristics required are:

Before you can use aggregates, you need to make sure that the aggregates of the totals data InfoCube contain the characteristics shown on the list. You might need to create suitable aggregates for the totals data InfoCube using tools available in BI.

Log

After validation of totals data, the system lists each individual result along with the overall result in the Validation Log. When executing a validation, you can have the log show only the check results in which errors occurred and which, therefore, need to be examined more closely.

Consequences of Validation

Within the consolidation process, validation is executed after data collection and before the downstream tasks to ensure that only valid data can be posted.

A validation contains an error if one or more messages with the type Error are output. If this occurs, the subsequent tasks can still be executed, but no longer blocked.