SAP FI Consultant Certification

Certification Test
SAP Consultant Certification Solution Consultant Financials -
Financial Accounting with mySAP ERP 2005

Software
* Software components: SAP ERP Central Component 6.0

Number of Questions
80

Duration
180 minutes


Notes

* Please note that you are not allowed to use any reference
materials during the certification test (no access to online
documentation or to any SAP system).
* The certification test Solution Consultant Financials -
Financial Accounting with mySAP ERP 2005 verifies the knowledge in the
area of mySAP ERP Financials for the consultant profile Financial
Accounting. This certificate proves that the candidate has a basic
understanding within this consultant profile, and can implement this
knowledge practically in projects.

Competency Areas

The following list helps you to identify the competency areas covered
in this test. The percentage indicates the portion of the test
dedicated to a particular competency area.

Competency

-Asset Accounting (AC305)
-Closing Operations in Financial Accounting (AC205)
-Document and Posting Control (Ac200)
-Evaluation Options in Reporting (AC280)
-Financial Accounting Master Data (AC200)
-Payment Program, Dunning Program, Correspondence, Interest Calcu (AC201))
-SAP Overview (ERP020)
-SAP Solution Manager (SM01)
-Special General Ledger Transactions, Document Parking, Substitut(AC202)
-The New General Ledger(AC210)


Source:
http://www.sap.com/services/education/certification/

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What is Company Code? in SAP

Company Code is a unique four alphanumeric characters that represents an independent and legal accounting entity. It's the smallest and minimum necessary organizational structure in SAP that required by law to provide a set of financial reports (such as Balance Sheet and Profit/Loss Statements). In the real world, a company code can be a company of a corporate group. In an SAP client, there can be one or several company codes. The general ledger is kept at company code level. For consolidation process in SAP EC module, a company code must be assigned to a company. A company can comprise one or more company codes.

With SAP FI module, we can generate the financial reports of a company code. A company code's financial reports are used for external purpose, such as for external auditors, shareholders/stock exchange commission, tax office, etc.

Company code is one of the two main organizational units of SAP FI module. The other one is Business Area. Business areas are used for internal purpose, such as for company's management. Business areas represent separate areas of operation within one or some companies. With business areas, for example, SAP can generate financial reports of a specific regional area of a company.

Let's say ABC company has one company code in USA (and several company codes in the whole world). With company code, SAP can only generate one set of financial reports for USA office. But, with business areas (depends on how it configured), SAP can generate sets of financial reports per state in the USA. By doing so, the management can analyze the performance of each branch in each state better. It gives more useful information that can be used in decision making process. The use of Business Areas is optional in SAP FI module.All SAP transactions that have impact to the financial reports from all SAP modules (such as FI, MM, HR, etc) will generate accounting journals in company code's general ledger.

The transaction can determine the company code involved either from the user input for the company code (such as in FI module) or from other organizational unit that related to the company code (such as in MM module, company code can be determined from the plant that input by user).

In MM module (Logistics), each plant must be assigned to a company code. A company code can have several plants.

A plant can also be assigned to a business area. A business area can be assigned to several plants.
Material valuation can be set at company code level or plant.

SAP FICO Company code configuration
SPRO path for company code creation

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SAP FI GL CONFIGURATION

These are the steps in GL configuration.

1. Creating company code

2. Create chart of accounts

3. Assign company code to chart of accounts

4. Define Account group

5. Define retained earnings Account

6. Maintain Fiscal year variant

7. Assign company code to a Fiscal year variant

8. Define Posting Period variant

9. Define variants for open periods posting

10. Assign Posting period variant to company Code

11. Create document number ranges for company code

12. Define document type and assign document number range

13. Enable Fiscal year default

14. Enable default value date

15. Maintain field status variants

16. Assign company code to field status variants

17. Screen variants for document entry

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Finance Terms in SAP FI

Client: In commercial, organizational and technical terms, a self-contained unit in an R/3 System with separate master records and its own set of tables.

Company Code: The smallest organizational unit of Financial Accounting for which a complete self-contained set of accounts can be drawn up for purposes of external reporting.

Business Area: An organizational unit of financial accounting that represents a separate area of operations or responsibilities within an organization and to which value changes recorded in Financial Accounting can be allocated.

Enterprise structure: A portrayal of an enterprise's hierarchy. Logical enterprise structure, including the organizational units required to manage the SAP System such as plant or cost center.

Social enterprise structure, description of the way in which an enterprise is organized, in divisions or user departments. The HR application component portrays the social structure of an enterprise

fiscal year variant: A variant defining the relationship between the calendar and fiscal year. The fiscal year variant specifies the number of periods and special periods in a fiscal year and how the SAP System is to determine the assigned posting periods.

Fiscal Year: A period of usually 12 months, for which the company produces financial statements and takes inventory.

Annual displacement/Year shift: For the individual posting periods various entries may be necessary. For example, in the first six periods the fiscal year and calendar year may coincide, whereas for the remaining periods there may be a displacement of +1.

Chart of Accounts: Systematically organized list of all the G/L account master records that are required in a company codes. The COA contains the account number, the account name and control information for G/L account master record.

Financial statement version: A hierarchical positioning of G/L accounts. This positioning can be based on specific legal requirements for creating financial statements. It can also be a self-defined order.

Account group: An object that attributes that determine the creation of master records. The account group determines: The data that is relevant for the master record A number range from which numbers are selected for the master records.

Field status group: Field status groups control the additional account assignments and other fields that can be posted at the line item level for a G/L account.

Posting Key: A two-digit numerical key that determines the way line items are posted. This key determines several factors including the: Account type, Type of posting (debit or credit),Layout of entry screens .

Open item management: A stipulation that the items in an account must be used to clear other line items in the same account. Items must balance out to zero before they can be cleared. The account balance is therefore always equal to the sum of the open items.

Clearing: A procedure by which the open items belonging to one or more accounts are indicated as cleared (paid).

Reconciliation account: A G/L account, to which transactions in the subsidiary ledgers (such as in the customer, vendor or assets areas) are updated automatically.

Special G/L indicator: An indicator that identifies a special G/L transaction. Special G/L transactions include down payments and bills of exchange.

Special G/L transaction: The special transactions in accounts receivable and accounts payable that are shown separately in the general ledger and sub-ledger.

They include:

• Bills of exchange
• Down payments
• Guarantees

House Bank: A business partner that represents a bank through which you can process your own internal transactions.

Document type: A key that distinguishes the business transactions to be posted. The document type determines where the document is stored as well as the account types to be posted.

Account type: A key that specifies the accounting area to which an account belongs.

Examples of account types are:

• Asset accounts
• Customer accounts
• Vendor accounts
• G/L accounts

Dunning procedure: A pre-defined procedure specifying how customers or vendors are dunned.

For each procedure, the user defines

• Number of dunning levels
• Dunning frequency
• Amount limits
• Texts for the dunning notices

Dunning level: A numeral indicating how often an item or an account has been dunned.

Dunning key: A tool that identifies items to be dunned separately, such as items you are not sure about or items for which payment information exists.

Year-end closing: An annual balance sheet and profit and loss statement, both of which must be created in accordance with the legal requirements of the country in question.

Standard accounting principles require that the following be listed:

• All assets
• All debts, accruals, and deferrals
• All revenue and expenses

Month-end closing: The work that is performed at the end of a posting period.

Functional area: An organizational unit in Accounting that classifies the expenses of an organization by functions such as:

• Administration
• Sales and distribution
• Marketing
• Production
• Research and development

Classification takes place to meet the needs of cost-of-sales accounting.

Noted item: A special item that does not affect any account balance. When you post a noted item, a document is generated. The item can be displayed using the line item display. Certain noted items are processed by the payment program or dunning program - for example, down payment requests.

Accrual and deferral: The assignment of an organization's receipts and expenditure to particular periods, for purposes of calculating the net income for a specific period.

A distinction is made between:

• Accruals -

An accrual is any expenditure before the closing key date that represents an expense for any period after this date.

• Deferral -

Deferred income is any receipts before the closing key date that represent revenue for any period after this date.

Statistical posting: The posting of a special G/L transaction where the offsetting entry is made to a specified clearing account automatically (for example, received guarantees of payment).

Statistical postings create statistical line items only.

Valuation area: An organizational unit in Logistics subdividing an enterprise for the purpose of uniform and complete valuation of material stocks.

Chart of depreciation: An object that contains the defined depreciation areas. It also contains the rules for the evaluation of assets that are valid in a specific country or economic area. Each company code is allocated to one chart of depreciation. Several company codes can work with the same chart of depreciation. The chart of depreciation and the chart of accounts are completely independent of one another.

Asset class: The main criterion for classifying fixed assets according to legal and management requirements.

For each asset class, control parameters and default values can be defined for depreciation calculation and other master data.

Each asset master record must be assigned to one asset class.

Special asset classes are, for example:

• Assets under construction
• Low-value assets
• Leased assets
• Financial assets
• Technical assets

Depreciation area: An area showing the valuation of a fixed asset for a particular purpose (for example, for individual financial statements, balance sheets for tax purposes, or management accounting values).

Depreciation key: A key for calculating depreciation amounts.

The depreciation key controls the following for each asset and for each depreciation area:

• Automatic calculation of planned depreciation
• Automatic calculation of interest
• Maximum percentages for manual depreciation

The depreciation key is defined by specifying:

• Calculation methods for ordinary and special depreciation, for interest and for the cutoff value
• Various control parameters

Period control method: A system object that controls what assumptions the system makes when revaluating asset transactions that are posted partway through a period.

Using the period control method, for example, you can instruct the system only to start revaluating asset acquisitions in the first full month after their acquisition.

The period control method allows different sets of rules for different types of asset transactions, for example, acquisitions and transfers.

Depreciation base: The base value for calculating periodic depreciation.

The following base values are possible, for example:

• Acquisition and production costs
• Net book value
• Replacement value

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SPRO path for Company Code Creation in SAP FI

Detailed description of Company code

We create company code from the following menu path of "SPRO" t-code:

Enterprise Structure - > Definition - > Financial Accounting - > Edit, Copy, Delete, Check Company

Code.There are two options to create company code:
Copy from other company code (or from SAP standard company code)
Create from the scratch
SAP recommends that we copy a company code from an existing company code. The advantage is SAP will also copy the existing company code-specific parameters. Then we can change certain data in the relevant application if necessary. This is much less time-consuming than creating a new company code.
Check out the video to create from scratch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od7fSxnJ1ro
Company code configuration

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Define document Number range in SAP FI

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What is Automatic Posting?

When you post documents in SAP, there are instances where the system also adds some more line items (such as tax, cash discount, gain/loss from foreign exchange transactions, etc.) besides the ones you have entered in the document. This helps to reduce your work as the system calculates these automatically. However, you need to define accounts you want the system to automatically post to; this will ensure that no manual posting is allowed to any of these accounts.

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Define a Company in SAP

A company is generally used in the legal consolidation module to roll up financial statements of several Company-Codes. A company can consist of one or more Company-Codes. It is important to make the distinction that a Company is NOT the same as a Company-Code.

Menu Path:

SAP Reference IMG -> Enterprise Structure -> Definition -> Financial Accounting -> Define Company

Click on "New entries"


Enter the details for the fields listed below:

Company (Enter a six-character alphanumeric identifier)

Company Name Name of your fictitious Organization

Street Street Address

Postal Code ZIP

City City

Country US

Language Key EN

Currency USD

Click on SAVE

A notification screen pops up showing that your request was carried out. Click on "Enter" to continue on the pop up screen showing compliance of request

At the bottom of the screen in the "Status Bar" another message is given showing that the Data was saved.

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Why are my invoices not selected in F110 ?

Often times users in SAP are puzzled by why a certain vendor's invoices are not selected by the payment run.

We will discuss one reason that is easy to identify and resolve.

When running a payment proposal SAP blocks the vendors whose invoices have been selected in another proposal. The savvy user will check the payment proposal log where he will be able to see vendors that are blocked by another proposal.

In this case I have run a proposal on the 18th but for some reason vendor 1000's invoices are not showing up. By pressing the proposal log button from within the payment run, Figure 1, the proposal log will be displayed, Figure 2. When examining the log, I will easily see that, that vendor 1000 is contained in a different proposal. At this point I have two options, either complete the other proposal or delete it to release the blocked invoices.

But what if you want to see all the vendors that are blocked by different proposals not just the ones that have been selected for payment in a specific proposal.

In this case you can query table REGUS: Accounts blocked by payment proposal

By querying the different rows in this table you will be able to obtain a listing of all the vendors that have been blocked in a proposal. Figure 3 displays the output of table REGUS.

By reviewing the contents of this table you will be able to see the “Run On” and Identification” fields required for finding the payment proposals that are blocking payment to your vendors.

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Document Splitting in SAP New GL General Ledger

SAP ECC 6.0 New GL has a new functionality to create segment financial statements. With the help of document splitting one can allocate an expense line item between two segments. FI Document split and segment is covered via a 'segment field' which is a standard field in the
totals table in the New General Ledger FAGLFLEXT. So how does one go about document splitting.
Document splitting needs to be enabled first at the client level customizing. Once this is enabled, then document splitting can be activated / deactivated in each company code. Similarly, 'Inheritance' can be activated which provides the level of detail for a document split. To take an example, by activating inheritance one can create a customer invoice from a revenue line item. The business areas or segements are automatically populated in the general ledger view showing the customer and tax line items. Activation of 'Inheritance' is recommended with document splitting as this does not require the business to then create 'rules' for business processes to ensure that account assignments are projected.
Document splitting in New GL can be divided into passive split, active(rule based) split or clearing lines by document. With passive document splitting, during clearing of a document, the account assignments of the items to clear are inherited to the clearing line items. Active splitting works on the principle of defining splitting rules. Splitting rules are configured which are used by SAP to make a document split. Finally, in case of clearing lines, New GL creates clearing lines automatically to achieve a split. Document splitting is
one of the key functionalities enabled by SAP New GL to help deliver segmented financial statements.

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What is credit memo processing in SAP FICO?

Credit memos in SAP are used to correct a vendor invoice. Once the invoice and the credit memo difference is posted in SAP, any open items left in the invoice, credit memo and payment can be cleared. To take an example, suppose you purchase office supplies worth $500. A user posts an invoice received from the vendor. Now suppose the user comes to know that $150 has already been paid on the invoice. A credit memo is used in such cases. In our example, the user will process a credit memo worth $150 in SAP. The difference between the invoice amount and credit memo i.e. $100 would be paid to the vendor via check.

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Special Ledger - OBS2

Special Ledger can be assigned by the transaction OBS2. If a ledger is assigned using OBS2, then it is valid for all company codes. In ECC6.0 and later, the concept of special ledger is not there. The concept of non-lending ledger is there.

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Difference between FS10N and FB3LN

FBL3N – Display Change Line Items (gives the open item list)
FS10N – Display Acct Balances (gives the balance of transaction figure)

To say it very plain - Transaction FS10N displays balances, this balance could include many different asset numbers, drill down required for individual asset numbers. FBL3N displays detail, drill down not required.

In case you find that balances in the 2 transactions dont match:
1. Line item display was switched on after there had already been postings to the account (Check your master record for changes in FSS4 and see if the line item display was changed at any point. )
2. Archiving has been done (archiving line items but obviously keeping the account balance correct). It can be very time consuming, but you can always use SE16 on table BSEG (with your company code and account number as selection fields) to check the actual line items. Line item display uses one of the index tables (BSIS) and there can be differences between that and the actual document database, which SE16 will show you.
3. Check search criteria of FBL3N
4. Check the G/L account whether it is enabled to Line Item Display
5. Run the programm SAPF190 to check the gap
6. Check for your user role, if you have the complete authorization objects for T Codes FS10N and FBL3N. Please take the help of your Basis Consultant for that.
7. Execute the report TFC_COMPARE_V2 from SE38 and also see the program documentation (blue information button) on the selection screen of the report.
8. Run transaction SE38 and execute program RFSEPA01

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GL Account Balance Display - FS10N

FS10N - is the the transaction code used for GL Account Balance Display.
Difference in Last year Closing balance and Current year Opening Balance

• This will be corrected after running carry forward programme FAGLGVTR (for ECC 6.0)
• Rerun the f.16 in test mode, this might generate the posting which would fix the disbalance

Note 402917 - If the opening balance does not correspond to the closing balance of the previous year on an account even after a repeated balance carryforward, you must always check whether you are dealing with a retained earnings account. If so, then you should check for inconsistencies in your system. And then you can activate the parameter for individualbalances retained earnings account during the start process of the balance carryforward program SAPFGVTR. You then receive a list of all P+L accounts with single values, which are balanced for the value of the retained earnings account. This means that you can reproduce and check the balance on the retained earnings account.

Asset number not displaying in report
SE16 for table BSEG will display asset number with the account balance.

Special fields on FS10N:
FS10N > Settings>Special Fields
This would promt a warning message stating that this would change a cross client table.
For example, if you make a change at client 800, it will change the setting on other table ( client 000 up to client 999). So, always discuss with ABAP folks before these configurations are changed.

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