This scenario provides information that will assist global companies dealing with purchasing functions which are impacted by time zone differences from one location to another. The Time Zone function is used to convert dates locally and a description of the resulting dates and recommendations for alternate procedures are explained in this topic.

• Posting date
• Document date
• Entry date.

The posting date and the document date are entered as defaults based on the user master. The entry date is the system date at the time of the transaction.

The document date and the posting date default to the time zone of the user. The system time is kept internally and displayed as the entry date.

Since the entry date differs from the document and posting dates for time zone enabled sites, use caution when you view dates in material documents for auditing and reporting purposes.

If period closings are done in a later time zone (such as the US) other areas could have problems posting material movements in their local time. A procedure for doing period closings ahead of time in the later time zone should be instituted to ensure the earlier time zone is not blocked from doing goods movement transactions.

Also, since a vendor is not typically on the same SAP system a time zone effect cannot be converted to the vendor. It is the responsibility of the vendor to determine the correct delivery time for the shipment.