Period Closing Activities for Assets 

Purpose

You transfer asset balances to Profit-Center Accounting in the course of normal period closing in Asset Accounting.

You can transfer asset balances as often as you wish, since the system deletes previously transferred data before each transfer.

Should you have already transferred the balance online in the same month, please note that the stock postings made here will also be deleted.

If you would like to transfer asset balances online, generate the opening balance in Profit Center Accounting. When doing this, perform the period-closing activities once, prior to selecting online transfer.

Prerequisites

To transfer asset balances to Profit Center Accounting, you must be using the component Asset Accounting (FI-AA).

As the program only transfers posted depreciations, the data cannot be transferred until after completion of the posting run for depreciations in Asset Accounting.

Process Flow

You access the transfer program by selecting Actual postings ® Transferring selected balance sheet items ® Generate opening balance for assets in Customizing for Profit Center Accounting.

The selection screen provides you with the choice of all company codes within the active controlling area. The depreciation area book depreciation per trade law (01) is provided as a default. You also select the posting period and the fiscal year.

You should run the program in the background, as large amounts of data are normally selected. If you select the field Line item, a line item will be created for each asset in Profit Center Accounting. When handling a large volume of data, you should only use this option for test purposes.

The system assigns assets to profit centers indirectly, via assigned internal orders or cost centers (see Assigning Assets). The program transfers the acquisition and product costs, as well as cumulated value adjustments. The accounts used for this transfer are taken from account determination for Asset Accounting.

Note that it is only possible to calculate key figures (such as Return on Investment) in Profit Center Accounting correctly if an indirect statement of assets and depreciations is made in Financial Accounting.

Parallel Currencies

In Asset Accounting, parallel currencies are represented in parallel depreciation areas, which only differ in currency. The areas are transferred automatically when you enter the main area (e.g. 01). If a parallel area exists with the currency type of the profit center currency, the system transfers the corresponding area. If this is not the case, the system translates the data into the profit center currency.

A company in the USA has a subsidiary in Canada. The Canadian subsidiary stores the depreciation area “Book depreciation” in the company code currency “Can$” and at the same time the group currency “US$”. The profit center currency of the controlling area is “US$”. When you transfer the depreciation area “Book depreciation”,  the system stores the data of this depreciation area in the company code currency (“Can$”) and that of the area with the group currency in the profit center currency (“US$”).

Result

The asset balances from the period in question are transferred to Profit Center Accounting. They are assigned indirectly to profit centers, via assigned internal orders or cost centers.

The program prints an error log. You can display the transferred data in the information system (see Standard Report Painter Reports in Profit Center Accounting). Provided that line items are available, these can be analyzed with the corresponding line item report.

First, the program updates the opening balance of assets. It also determines the final balance of the previous period and updates this with a minus ("-") sign. As a result, the totals records in each period contain the movements in assets, as is customary in Financial Accounting. This indirect method has the advantage that you do not need to carry the balance forward in Profit Center Accounting at the end of the year. The total balance of assets is posted to the period 01 if there is no balance in period 0.