Customer Field 

Definition

A customer field is a database table field that is created and defined by the customer.

Such fields are therefore not delivered in the SAP standard system.

The inclusion of customer fields has effects across the whole system (as well as across all clients) because customer fields entail repository changes. However, you are not obliged to use these fields in all clients.

Use

The standard delivery already contains many fields (or “dimensions”), such as business area, profit center, and segment. You can also tailor the way these fields are used to your reporting needs. For these fields, SAP provides extensive functions and integrated processes, such as those for the profit center.

You must not use any of the standard fields for alternative purposes. From the technical point of view, you should only use them for storing information in documents and in the totals data. The reason for this restriction is that, at a later date, you might want to use some of the standard fields that you currently do not use. It would be problematic at the point if you had already used those fields for other purposes.

Nevertheless, the fields contained in the standard delivery might not be sufficient to meet your needs. In such cases, you can consider using fields that you define yourself, referred to as "customer fields".

From Release SAP ECC 5.0, you can include customer fields directly in new General Ledger Accounting, without having to implement an FI-SL solution in parallel, as was required in previous releases. Customer fields can be added to the standard set of tables in new General Ledger Accounting and can be valuated using the standard reporting tools. This may mean that customer developments  (such as customer-specific reports) that were used previously then become superfluous if you have created special valuations on the basis of existing posting data.

By including customer fields in new General Ledger Accounting, you achieve the technical basis for meeting additional business requirements.

It is the responsibility of the customer to establish the correct portrayal of the content of the customer fields (such as how the fields are filled and analyzed).

In Financial Accounting, you can include customer fields in the coding block. In this way, you can broaden the scope of new General Ledger Accounting by adding new customer fields and by combining such fields with the existing standard fields. This enables you to adapt the information in new General Ledger Accounting to the specific reporting requirements of your company.

However, you ought to give careful consideration to whether you want to use customer fields and to how you want to define them. The number of customer fields you create is also of significance because the fields need to be filled or enriched when documents are entered or transferred. Other than the manual postings, this concerns in particular the automatic postings as well as postings that are made via interfaces. It is therefore recommended that you apply the rule “as much as necessary but as little as possible” when filling the fields and when reporting with these fields.

Customer fields can be used in the following ways:

●      As product-related or activity-related characteristics

Examples:

○       Vehicle categories: Medium-sized, luxury, small

○       Product group: Electrical appliances, tools, spare parts

○       Product groups: New cars, second-hand cars, leased cars

○       Characteristics for maintenance work (part of production)

○       Characteristics for customer services (part of service activities)

●      Organizational or managerial characteristics

Examples:

○       Regions: Europe, America, Asia

○       Characteristics for specific business/company areas: Locations and similar, provided such areas cannot be covered by profit centers or cost centers

●      Characteristics due to industry or legal requirements

Example: Contract types or other contract characteristics in the area of insurance and financial services

Customer fields are usually used for analyzing information at an aggregated level. In this way, the number of characteristic values is usually manageable. Moreover, customer fields can also be used to assign specific documents or line items to a customer-specific characteristic. In such cases, you might not need to assign the complete document volume, but just selected posting data. In the most basic case, a customer field is used for storing structured information that is not stored in the standard fields.

You generally consider using a customer field if you want to use it with values combined freely with the account assignments in standard fields and if it proves indispensable for reporting at the document level and/or the totals record level.

Although it is possible to differentiate G/L accounts instead of using customer fields, this solution has drawbacks. It leads to redundant G/L accounts and consequently inflates the coding block. In any case, such a solution is generally not acceptable because it could also cause problems if you use the frequently deployed account approach for parallel accounting, thereby making the additional differentiation of accounts necessary.

For information on how to create customer fields, see Customizing Customer Fields.

Restrictions on Using Customer Fields

Restrictions Related to the Accounting Concept

From the perspective of the accounting concept you use, the main prerequisite for the use of customer fields is that the reporting requirements are based on the information in General Ledger Accounting. You can use balance sheet items or individual accounts, for example, to valuate stocks, receivables, payables, or even financial statement items on the basis of specific criteria. Ultimately, it has to be possible to assign financial accounting documents or items. It is not useful to deploy customer fields in Financial Accounting for purely logistic requirements if sales by product groups or customer groups, for example, are available as a central part of sales processing or purchasing in the respective valuations throughout Logistics and the Logistics Information System. Alternatively, you can create these reports at an aggregated level in the SAP Business Information Warehouse (BI). The inclusion of customer fields is not intended to replace Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) either. The use of customer fields in new General Ledger Accounting should relate closely to the specific information needs or business requirements in Financial Accounting.

In new General Ledger Accounting, there are scenarios that update the associated, available standard fields in the totals table in new General Ledger Accounting. These scenarios are as follows:

●      FIN_SEGM:Segment Reporting

●      FIN_PCA:Profit Center Update

●      FIN_GSBER:Business Area

●      FIN_UKV:Cost of Sales Accounting

●      FIN_CONS:Preparation for Consolidation

●      FIN_CCA: Cost Center Update

The following industry-specific scenarios are also available:

●      PSM_FAC: Funds Accounting

●      PSM_GM: Grants Management

The use of customer fields should therefore not replace these standard scenarios. If, for example, you want to perform segment reporting in accordance with US GAAP or IFRS/IAS, you should use the Segment field, which is designed for this purpose. New General Ledger Accounting enables you to combine customer fields with the available standard fields so that you can, for example, create P&L statements by profit center and special criteria within your company. This gives you the option of using the dimensions you require in a totals table.

If a customer field can always be derived from a standard field (such as Segment), it raises the question as to whether the customer-specific characteristic values ought to be considered in that standard field (that is, whether additional segments need to be included, for example). However, it is not always useful to do this because this can inflate the characteristic values, and it would then not be possible to extend the data model as required.

Before implementing customer fields, as early as the conception phase, be sure to take the potential growth of the characteristic values into consideration.

Technical Restrictions

The inclusion of customer fields does not automatically affect or trigger subsequent process in the SAP standard system. From the perspective of Financial Accounting, it is feasible that certain actions (such as the creation of correspondence or informing designated employees or departments within the company) are triggered by values being entered in customer fields. You could implement such subsequent processes separately (if necessary) in the relevant application, potentially using enhancements or workflows.

The SAP standard delivery does not foresee the fixed assignment of master data in Financial Accounting (G/L accounts, vendors, customers, bank master records, assets in FI-AA) to specific characteristic values in customer fields so that these values can be included in the transfer during posting to financial accounting documents. Provided you do not want to fill your customer fields manually during entry, you can use user exits to fill them automatically on the basis of individual rules. For this, note that customer fields do not form part of the subledgers for customers, vendors and assets. This means that, in the coding block, you can only assign customer fields to G/L account items (accounts for financial statements). In this way, the customer fields in Financial Accounting cannot be used for open item accounting (accounts receivable, accounts payable) or for asset reports in FI-AA. However, you can use enhancements to include customer fields in the master data. Nevertheless, such fields are not customer fields from the coding block perspective.

Note that customer fields can significantly increase the data volume in the totals table. For this reason, before you use customer fields productively in the totals table in new General Ledger Accounting, you should ensure that the data volume in the totals table does not attain a critical level. For more information, see SAP Note 820495. Consequently, you should only include in the totals table customer fields that you essentially need. You cannot include any fields in the totals table if they have the potential of acquiring a very large number of characteristic values. You should only use such fields as coding block fields in the document. We therefore strongly recommend defining the possible characteristic values of a customer field in the form of a customer-specific value table (check table).

It is not possible to use standard means to delete a customer field once it has been created.

Restrictions During Implementation

If you intend to use a customer field, you should definitely deploy it upon implementing (or migrating to) new General Ledger Accounting so that the documents and totals data contain this field from the beginning. It is not possible in the standard system to subsequently supplement totals data or open items with document splitting; this requires a project-specific migration solution. For more information, see SAP Note 891144.

For the implementation of a customer field in new General Ledger Accounting, different initial situations need to be considered with regard to the migration from classic General Ledger Accounting to new General Ledger Accounting. For more information, see Migration with Customer Fields.

Structure

For more information about the data structure, see Data Structure for Customer Fields.

Integration

For information about filling customer fields (automatic derivation or manual posting), see Integration: Filling Customer Fields.