When you record a document in SAP, you enter the posting date. SAP uses the posting date specified in the document automatically to determine the posting period (PP). The Posting Period consists of a month and a fiscal year.
Both are displayed in the document overview screen of FI module. Posting Period is entered in the document and the transaction figures for these periods are updated. If you want to display the balance of an account, the transaction figures are displayed separately according to posting periods.
If you use the Special Purpose Ledger, you can define different Posting Periods per ledger. Only the Posting Period defined for the general ledger is stored in the document.
In order to determine PPs, you must fulfill the following prerequisites:
- Define your fiscal year
- The periods in which you want to record the transaction must be open.
For postings to the previous fiscal year, the system carries out the following adjustments:
- For balance sheet accounts, the system adjusts the carry forward balance of the accounts concerned in the current fiscal year.
- For profit and loss accounts, the profit or loss carried forward to the retained earnings account is adjusted.
Opening New Fiscal Years in SAP
The new fiscal year in SAP is automatically opened when you make your first posting in the new fiscal year or once the balance carried forward program has been run. You do not have to close the old fiscal year in SAP before you can record a transaction in the new one. You therefore do not need to create closing or opening financial statements.
The prerequisites for posting to a new fiscal year in SAP are as follows:
- If you are using a fiscal year variant which is year-specific in SAP then you first have to create a variant for this fiscal year and assign it to the relevant company code.
- If you have also defined year-dependent document number assignment, you must have already set up the document number ranges for the new fiscal year. For more information,
- The relevant posting periods must be open in the new fiscal year.
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