Fiscal Year Variant of a Consolidation Unit
Definition
Determines the fiscal year variant that is used for currency translation of the reported financial data of a consolidation unit.
Use
Specifying Time in Consolidation
Consolidation is period-oriented. This means that the Customizing settings and the processing functions are always based on either (a) the period specified in the current context (that is, the workbench or monitor parameters, or the selection screen for executing tasks), or (b) the consolidation interval that results from the consolidation frequency. Hence, you always specify the appropriate consolidation period on all selection and entry screens, and in all upload files. This especially applies to uploads of transaction data and the optional input of the first data entry period in the master record of the consolidation unit.
Specifying Time in the Consolidation Environment
In addition to its own functions, consolidation also employs various auxiliary functions that require specific calendar dates. This includes the currency translation and the time-dependent hierarchies in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI). To enable the system to determine a corresponding date from the consolidation period at all times, the prevailing fiscal year variant of (central) consolidation needs to be fixed in the consolidation area .
Consolidation Units with Noncalendar Fiscal Years
Initially, the aforementioned rules also apply to consolidation units that have noncalendar fiscal years. In particular, the financial data of consolidation units always needs to be reported in the central consolidation period as prescribed by the consolidation area – regardless of the current period in the decentralized financial statements of the consolidation unit.
However,
Consolidation
supports one exception: If there are no current individual financial statements that match the current consolidation period, but you want to collect a past set of individual financial statements for consolidation, you can do this by specifying a different fiscal year variant in the master record of the consolidation
unit
. In this case, this information is used in
currency translation
to find the date for determining exchange rates.
Integration
The fiscal year variant defined in the master record of the consolidation unit is interpreted exclusively in currency translation. Its sole purpose is to support the scenario for collecting individual statement data based on noncalendar fiscal years (which is described above). The fiscal year variant of the consolidation unit does not affect any other consolidation functions (such as data entry and upload), nor does it affect consolidation reporting.
All periods specified in consolidation refer to the fiscal year variant that is fixed in the consolidation area.
Example
The parent unit consolidates annually in period 012 as per December 31. The individual financial statements of a subsidiary are also annual, but as per September 30. In this case, the unmodified statement data needs to be reported according to the fiscal year variant and period in the parent's consolidation system.
In the master record of the consolidation unit, you also need to define a fiscal year variant that has September 30 as the last date of period 012. To determine exchange rates in consolidation period 012 for this consolidation unit, the currency translation function now uses the date on which the values originally existed in local currency - in this case, September 30, not December 31.