Companies 
One of the first steps involved in setting up a consolidation consists of copying the individual companies to the FI-LC system. In this section, the fundamental data of a company is explained. Further explanations pertaining to company relevant data are discussed in other sections.
You can maintain company master in either the Implementation Guide or in the consolidation menu using the option Master data
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Companies. You must then select one of the following functions:
Creating a company
Follow these steps to create a company:
- Assign an alphanumeric company ID with a maximum of six characters to every company to be included in the consolidation. Since some of the information to be assigned may be dependent on the date of record, you are asked to enter the fiscal year and period for each company ID in the request screen. You must also enter a ledger (for more information see
Ledgers) and a version. When creating a new company, you can copy the data from an existing company as a reference.
You assign control parameters to a company:
- on a year-dependent and period-dependent basis for currency translation methods and tax rates
- on a version-dependent basis for data transfer methods and currency translation methods
The company IDs must be a maximum of 4 digits long when using PC data entry via DBase or an extract from R/2 for entering the individual financial statement data for the companies.
- Enter the company’s local currency in the Currency field. You can enter the values of an individual financial statement in group currency if the field Entry in group curr. is selected. This is of particular significance for high inflationary economies.
- Enter the year and the period of the first consolidation when consolidating capital. You can refine the time as to when the first consolidation took place in Subgroup Maintenance.
- In the Legal status field, you can define the company as a branch office, otherwise the company is treated as an independent unit.
- You must indicate which companies are not to be included in the consolidated financial statements and the reason why they are exempt. Alternatively, you can assign inclusion reasons for those companies which are to be included. Maintain the reasons for inclusion and exclusion in the Implementation Guide under Master Data
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Companies.
- The Data transfer field determines which method is used to transfer a company’s data into the FI-LC system. Depending on the method, you need to maintain additional specifications. Read the relevant documentation in the Implementation Guide in the step Maintain companies.
- The next screen in company maintenance stores data relevant for correspondence purposes. On this screen you can enter a separate address for the company. If you do not enter an address here, the system copies the address information from the first screen.
- For reporting purposes, you can define three additional sort criteria per company on this screen. The sort criteria are maintained in the Implementation Guide in the section Information System
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Totals Reports. When you are maintaining the company, a description of each of the three sort criteria is displayed on the screen. The names of the three sort criteria are each stored in the table and marked with ' '. This text then appears as the field name of the input field. This allows you to freely define sort characteristics (e.g.: business lines for sort field 1 and region for sort field 2). You can define various values (such as, the continents being regions) for each sort criterion. These texts then appear as headings on the report.
You can print out a list of the companies created under Info system
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Master data
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Companies. For more information on this topic, read
Printing Master Data, Financial Data and Control Parameters.
Creating a company in a new version
If you want to create a company with the same company ID in another consolidation version, choose Company
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Change.- In the initial screen, enter the company ID, fiscal year, period, ledger and new version.
- In the detail screen, you need to maintain the data transfer method, since this is version-dependent.
Deleting a company
You can delete a company which you created for test purposes, for example. However, you should not delete a company if transaction data exists in the database.
In the initial screen for company deletion, you can specify a ledger. However, the company will be deleted from all ledgers in which it has been created, and not only the one you specified. It is therefore not possible to limit deletion to one ledger.