Chart of Accounts (SAP Library - Preparations for Consolidation (FI))

Chart of Accounts

The Consolidation system uses so-called financial statement items (or FS items) to manage its data of values and quantities. In the narrow sense, you might picture a ‘corporate chart of accounts’ that is typically not as detailed as those in the operative applications. The assignments between accounts and FS items, as pertaining to data transfer procedures, have already been described under ‘General Aspects of Consolidation’ in the section Key Structures.

Here is a summary of several notes you should be aware of while designing the chart of accounts with regards to the consolidation assignments:

For business transactions within the group there is no need for any special accounts exceeding the classifications required by law, whereby account separation is only required for balance sheet accounts. External as well as (group-)internal transactions may be posted to the same accounts on the income statement; the assignment of trading partners is used to distinguish the two.

The Consolidation system manages retained earnings and net income for the year as independent value items as opposed to balance amounts as in the FI System, where no postable corresponding accounts are represented.

Reporting-relevant changes to balance sheet items, such as acquisitions, retirements, transfers, appropriations, etc., are distinguished using the additional assignment of transaction types, but kept on a single account.

For reports by transaction currency, separate accounts for each currency key are not needed in the Consolidation system. Instead, the balances which are broken down by currency key are used.

Due to some regulations, certain balance sheet accounts need to be shown on either the asset or the liabilities side, depending on the account balance. Transfers to Consolidation that use the periodic FI extract correctly condense and assign these accounts according to the ‘substitution logic’ in FI’s balance sheet control. During the other data transfer procedures (update, rollup) only the periodic values are available, but not the ending balances of the accounts; thus, a correct, automatic assignment is not possible. The Consolidation system only stores the ending balance of the FS items and posts transfers when necessary. Because of this, it is absolutely necessary to assign the accounts to the FS items as detailed as possible to ensure that each FS item can be ‘substituted’ depending on its balance without requiring compression logic. This problem does not occur infrequently, but can, on the other hand, only be avoided by using the other transfer procedure FI Extract.

Period costing and cost of sales accounting

SAP system integration currently supports only primary posting according the period costing method. Cost of sales accounting is only supported in the Profitability Analysis system CO-PA, which receives its calculating data from the Billing system.

An individual company’s income statement in FI can only be ‘posted’ according to the cost of sales method using a periodic batch input of the profitability analysis data. Please refer to the documentation regarding Profitability Analysis.

The concept of transferring both earnings statements into Consolidation is not available in the standard Release 3.0. If needed, one of our consultants should initially provide a solution.