You analyze summary data from customer, vendor, and G/L accounts to display account balances and balance lists. The account balance display offers you a quick overview of the account balance and any account balance changes made. The balances that are displayed are described in Structure of Summary data.

If you want to analyze data from another viewpoint, you can write ABAP/4 reports to do this. When analyzing summary data, you are tied to the structure of client, account number, company code and, with G/L accounts, business area that is predefined. For evaluations requiring a different level of detail, you must evaluate the actual documents.

In the G/L account area, you evaluate the summary data in the general ledger for financial statements as well as for account balance display purposes. In addition, with the Special Purpose Ledger component, you can define additional ledgers and therefore summary records under another structure for evaluation purposes. This is useful if you constantly require these reports, if you want to retrieve them online immediately, or if you want to refer to the summary data for comparison purposes.

Since you define the structures for the additional ledgers yourself, you cannot evaluate this summary data with the standard functions or programs. You have access to special functions and the Report Painter for the evaluation of these ledgers. Using Report Painter, you can define how the saved summary data is edited. To evaluate the data, you can assign the key fields of a ledger to the lines and columns of the report as you wish.

For further information on evaluations, see the Special Purpose Ledger (FI-SL) documentation. This is located in the R/3 Library under Financial Accounting.