To post financial transaction into SAP FICO, we define fiscal year and to represent months within fiscal year it is again divided to posting periods. Fiscal year is not defined for a particular company code. Fiscal year is defined as a variant and then assigned to the company code. One fiscal year variant can be assigned to more than one company code. Through this assignment it will work for a company code.
Special posting period is defined while defining fiscal year variant and it works for a company code after its assignment to it. If you define it as 1 then for a company code, sap will count special posting period as one. You can define it up to maximum of 4 special posting periods.
At the year end, external auditor will audit the company’s books of accounts. During this audit, year end closing entries will be entered for adjustments to books of accounts. Special posting periods are defined in sap to record these adjustment entries for year end closing. When you define it as 4 in a fiscal year variant, sap divides the last month i.e. the 12th one in to 4 parts. It does not mean that you can not record transaction to the last month. In addition to posting of normal transactions to 12th you can also post year end closing transactions to any of these special posting periods.
Transactions are posted to it based on the date of transaction. If your transaction date falls within the last normal month then you can post it to any of the special posting period. Transaction code OB29 is used to define fiscal year variant and transaction code OB37 is used to assign these fiscal year variant to company code. To define the start and end date of each posting period including the special one we use transaction code OB52.