Use

You can depict parallel accounting in your SAP system by storing posting data for the various accounting principles in separate ledgers.

The data for one accounting principle is stored in the general ledger.This is known as the “leading” valuation view.

For each additional (parallel) accounting principle, you create an additional ledger in the Special Ledger component.

Recommendation

SAP recommends that you implement this parallel ledger approach if the number of general ledger accounts would be unmanageable for the scenario using additional accounts. Before opting for this approach, you should check whether you are willing to accept the deficiencies in direct accessing with this approach.

The advantages of this approach are:

You do not have to create any additional G/L accounts.

You manage a separate ledger for each accounting principle.

You can use the standard reporting functions to create a financial statement.

In some cases, the postings to the additional ledger are made as complete postings, whereas in other cases they are made as delta postings.

With this approach, you can portray different fiscal year variants.

The approach is suitable if:

The number of G/L accounts would be too large to depict parallel accounting using additional accounts

Keeping a separate ledger per accounting principle offers advantages to you

You do not have to post any line items from subsidiary ledgers

You do not need to access FI data from SL reports

The additional data volume created by the additional ledger does not represent a problem

Integration

You can make postings to the additional ledger from various SAP application components.

Financial Accounting (FI)

Asset Accounting (FI‑AA)

Corporate Finance Management (CFM)

Controlling (CO)

Only the valuation (accounting principle) stored in the general ledger is integrated with Controlling.The additional ledger is not integrated with Controlling.This means that postings that are only made to the additional ledger are not available for Controlling.

As the line items in the additional ledger contain CO account assignments, you can carry out simple Controlling transaction directly via the additional ledger.The tools in application component Special Ledger are available to you for this purpose, such as allocation

Features

In order that the desired posting data is stored in your additional ledger, you need to adhere to the following:

Complete ledger

If your data volume is not too large, SAP recommends using your additional ledger as the complete ledger. In this way, the postings without valuation differences are posted to the general ledger and to the additional ledger.

Complete Postings versus Difference Postings

Postings that differ depending on the accounting principle applied can be posted either as a difference posting for the posting in the general ledger (as a delta posting) or as a complete posting. Only the application component Asset Accounting (FI-AA) supports delta postings.

SAP recommends implementing the delta method for postings from Asset Accounting because, for complete postings, you have to subsequently filter out the valuations of valuation area 01 from the additional ledger.

Ledger selection

Postings made to the general ledger are updated automatically to the additional ledger.To ensure that the additional ledger only contains data that is relevant for the parallel accounting principle, you have to use a ledger selection to filter out data that you only want to post to the general ledger.

Documents that automatically create valuation reports contain the account assignment accounting principle .You can use this account assignment in your ledger selection to define what is posted to the general ledger and what is posted to the additional ledger.Manually posted documents do not contain this account assignment.

SAP recommends that you define a special document type for manual postings that you only want to be made to the general ledger.You can then use this document type in your ledger selection.

Manual postings

You have to use the actual posting function in the special ledgers to make manual postings that you only want to post to the additional ledger.

Reporting

For reporting, you can use the following tools in this approach:

Drilldown

Report Painter / Report Writer

To create financial statements, you can use the report F/S for Special Purpose Ledger (RFBILA00)

Activities

To depict parallel accounting using an additional ledger, you have to make various settings in Customizing: For details on these settings, see Setting Up Depiction Using Additional Ledgers .