Posting periods are defined in fiscal year variant. You can open and close such periods in a posting period variant. To prevent wrong posting to a particular month you need to periodically close these periods which as per the business process need to be closed in financial accounting. The best business practice is to always open the current posting period and the period prior to the current.
When the current period ends, the next opened. Special periods are defined in fiscal year variants and are used for financial accounting closing. Postings made to financial accounting in the last month can be entered into the special posting periods.
One variant can be used to many company codes but one company code can not be attached to more than one period. It’s defined at the client level and assigned to the respective company codes. SAP has delivered standard variants which can be used or a new one can be created by copying the existing one. In SAP the tables dependency plays a vital role in complete functioning of the SAP module so it’s always advised to create it by copying the existing one or by using the SAP delivered standard posting periods.
Various account types are defined in SAP;
Abbreviation | Description |
S | General Ledger Posting |
D | Customer Posting |
K | Vendor Posting |
A | Asset Posting |
M | Material Postings |
+ | All Accounts |
It can be handled differently for different account type. At the line item level SAP system checks the account type based on the posting key to ensure that the period of the account type is open. If it’s not opened then it gives a error message. The period and fiscal year for a particular account type is determined based on the posting date you entered in the document header. Only if the period for a particular fiscal year of an account type is open then system will allow you to have posting.
If for a specific account type it is closed then transaction posting to that account will not be allowed. If you planned to handle it for all the account types in the same way then instead of defining the posting periods for individual account type, you can define set this only to account type “+”. + represents all the account type i.e. S, D, K, A, V and M.
Authorization group should be assigned to the special periods to make sure than only those peoples who are assigned to the closing process are allowed to enter the transactions (authorization object: F_BKPF_BUP).
Creation of Variant
You can create the variant through transaction code OBBO or by using following path;
SPRO > Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > Document > Posting periods > Define Variants
Assign the Variant to Company Code
As discussed the variant is created at the client level. To get it worked for your company code you need to assign the PP variant to the company code by using transaction OBBP or can be done by using following path;
SPRO > Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > Document > Posting Periods > Assign Variants to Company Code
Opening and Closing of Period
It can be opened or closed by using transaction code OB52 or by using following path;
Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > document > Posting periods > Open and Close Posting periods