What is Document Type in SAP – Relationship with Number Range

Document types in SAP are defined to distinguish different business transactions. For example, transactions like customer payment and vendor credit memos are distinguished with two different document type in SAP to identify it in future.

Document types in SAP are defined at the client level. Standard SAP already contains some default document types for your use.

Also Read: What is Client in SAP – SAP System Environment

While posting a transaction, type of document must be specified in the header section. By customizing default document type in SAP against each transaction type you can relieve the user from keying in every time while posting a transaction.

Document type in SAP reflects different business transactions in the organization. Since its displayed for every line items, one can immediately find out the kind of business transactions that the user has entered in sap. It’s also used for evaluation purposes.

To differentiate business transactions you can specify each document type in SAP to a type of account that a particular transaction can use.

For example: document type AB allows posting to all accounts. All other document types limit the types of accounts that can be posted to. For example Document type DA, allows posting to customer (D) and G/L accounts (S) only. The various account types and description are listed below.

Document type and Number range relationship in SAP

Document Numbers, uniquely identifies every transaction within a fiscal year in a company code.

Number ranges for a document type in sap are used to define how numbers can be assigned to a transaction.

For every number range, following things must be specified.

• A two-character code
• Period until when the number range is valid
• An interval from which the numbers are chosen and
• Whether the number range is used in internal or external number assignment

Intervals for number ranges must not overlap.

Since transactions are kept in SAP for an indefinite amount of time, one has to define intervals that are large enough to handle this factor. Following system features ensure that number intervals are large enough:

• Number ranges can be defined for each company code. Thus, each company code can use the same number interval.
• Numbers can be up to ten characters long.
• Number ranges can be defined for each fiscal year.

All the number ranges will be Year Dependent. That means every year new number ranges has to be maintained in the system.

In SAP, a number range is specified for each document types in SAP to generate a unique number which can be refereed always to track back the original transaction.

Each transaction number is selected from this number range. One number range can be used for several document types.

Followings are standard document types in SAP;

You can use transaction code OBA7 or following path to define document types in SAP;

SPRO > Financial Accounting > General Ledger Accounting > Business Transaction > G/L Account Posting > Carry Out and Check document settings > define document type

To default a document type for transaction postings you can use transaction code OBU1 or following user path

SPRO > Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > Document > Line item > Default values for document posting > define document types and posting key

If you want, you can be change and assign your own document type in SAP and posting key to get defaulted while posting a transaction in SAP.