Financial Experts: Useful Tips

FI Tips:

• Why are my invoices not selected in F110 ?
• How to zero out an account balance in local currency ? (FBB1)
• How to post to a VAT account ? (FB41)
• Modifying Header Text in Line Item Reports
• Drill Down Reporting in SAP FI

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. There may be many reasons for this and I will cover them in a subsequent issue but today, I will touch on 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.

Download this tip from: http://www.thelogicalroute.com/PDF/SAP%20FI%20Tips%20012010.pdf

How to zero out an account balance in local currency?

On occasion you may run into a situation where an account has a balance in local currency but not in foreign currency. This may happen for numerous reasons such as problems with the revaluation process, leftovers from a data conversion or some other issue. See Figure 1 for an example of such an account summarized by document currency. The local currency of the company code is EUR and we have balances in local currency of USD and EUR but the balance in document currency is zero If you try to enter a transaction using FB01, if the transaction currency equals the local currency (EUR), you will not
have an option to enter the local currency value. SAP will default the value entered in the amount field into the amount in local currency, see Figure 2. If the transaction currency is different than the local currency for example USD, SAP will not allow you to enter a zero value in the document currency field.

The solution to this is to use transaction code FBB1. This transaction code is the same one that is used by the revaluation program to enter transactions with a zero value in the amount field of a financial transaction. See Figure 3 for an example of using this transaction. In this case I have entered a zero value in the amount field and 775.19 in the amount in local currency field. Note that if you manage additional currencies such as group currency you need to handle them as well.

If you now take a look at Figure 4, the GL account detail (FBL3N) you will see that the amount in local currency for currency USD is zero. Of course, as always you should check this in your test environment to understand the impact on your account balance and the revaluation program.

Download this tip from: http://www.thelogicalroute.com/PDF/SAP%20FI%20Tips%20022010.pdf

How to post to a VAT account?

In certain cases you may need to make an entry in the VAT account. This may be required when you need to make an adjustment to the VAT account directly. Another reason may be that you do not post automatically from the SAP standard VAT report “S_ALR_87012357 Advance Return for Tax on Sales/Purchases” and need to post to the VAT payable account manually.
As you may know, if your VAT accounts are configured correctly as displayed in Figure 1, when posting to a VAT account SAP will request you to enter a VAT code and the base amount as displayed in Figure 2.
This is not recommended since it will require maintaining a special tax code for this reason and also since it will need to be excluded when running the standard SAP VAT report.

The solution to this is to use transaction code FB41. This transaction code is the same one that is used by the standard SAP VAT program to post to the tax payable accounts. When using this transaction you do not need to enter a VAT code or a tax base amount. See Figure 3 below. Note that the tax code and checkbox for calculating the base amount are not part of this screen. See Figure 4 for the posted document.

Download this tip from: http://www.thelogicalroute.com/PDF/SAP%20FI%20Tips%20032010.pdf

Modifying Header Text in Line Item Reports

The G/L Account, Vendor and Customer line item reports are some of the most frequently used reports by accounting personnel, see Figure 1. As such, users often times want to modify the layout and display of these reports. Users are not always familiar with the fact that the header of these reports can also be changed. In the following pages I will show you a simple way to make such a change.
To add a field to the report header section, you need to navigate from the top menu bar to: Settings, Layout and then Current Header rows. See Figure 2.

This will place you in the “Change Headers” screen and allow you to modify the report header, as demonstrated in Figure 3. From this point you can make a change to a general variable such as date or page number. You can also make changes to characteristics, which are vendor master data related such as address and name etc.

In Figure 4, I am inserting the “Date of Output” general variable to the report header, which is displayed between "brackets"

After saving, the change will be immediately reflected in the report as shown in Figure 5.
To have the header data repeat for each vendor the sort order must be set as displayed in Figure 6, otherwise you will get asterisks (*) for the header data. The account field needs to be included and a page feed must be selected.
Note that the change of header rows impact anyone running the report in the organization so care must be taken when making these changes.

Download this tip from: http://www.thelogicalroute.com/PDF/SAP%20FI%20Tips%20042010.pdf

Drill Down Reporting in SAP FI

In this article I will introduce some basic FI reporting capabilities. For example, Accounts Receivables provides several out-of-the-box reports for Balance and Line Item Analysis. These reports can be accessed by using transaction code FDI0, see Figure 1.
By running the due data analysis report you will obtain the report as displayed in Figure 2.

At this point you have several options: (1) drill down to the customer line item report, (2) change the leading column on the report and (3)filter and sort. To drill down to the customer line item report you place the mouse pointer on the cell you wish to drill down on and then press the ‘call up report’ button, see Figure 3. This will bring up the customer line items report.

Another feature of this report is the ability to display the data by the different characteristics of the report. These are the values that appear on the upper left hand part of the report, in our case, they include: Document Type, Company Code, Country and Posting Key. For example, if I would like to display the receivables by country, I press the customer field which changes color to orange and the press the country key which will switch the summarization of the report between customer and country. On the next page I will explain how to do this.

First press the customer field and then the country field as can be seen in Figure 4 and the new output in Figure 5.

To change the selection characteristics of the report you can change the report. While selecting the report, select, Drilldown report, change from the drop down menu. This will bring up a screen that allows you to change characteristics, output type and additional options. Note that you should do this on your Z version of the report. See Figure 6. On the left you will see the existing characteristics and on the right the available ones. For example, we can add Acctg Clerk to the report if we wish to track receivables by this characteristic.

There are many other settings that can be made in this report change area. I have just demonstrated a small part of the options and you will need to experiment with the rest. Note that there is also the option of creating your own report layouts but this topic is out of the scope of this article.

Download this tip from: http://www.thelogicalroute.com/PDF/SAP%20FI%20Tips%20062010.pdf

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Source: TLR Tech