Fiscal Year Variant in SAP is usually a period of twelve months for which a company regularly creates financial statements and checks inventories. It may correspond exactly to the calendar year, but this is not compulsory. Under certain circumstances a fiscal year variant in SAP can be less than twelve months (shortened fiscal yr).
A financial year is divided into posting periods. Each posting period is defined by a start and a finish date. Before you can post documents, you must define a posting period in SAP, which in turn define the fiscal year.
In addition to the posting periods, you can also define special periods for yr-end closing.
In General Ledger Accounting, a financial year can have a maximum of twelve posting periods and four special periods. You can define up to 366 posting periods in the Special Purpose Ledger.
In order to assign business transactions to different time periods, you must define a fiscal year variant in SAP with posting periods. Defining a fiscal year variant in SAP is Compulsory.
You define your year as fiscal year variants which you then assign to your company code. One fiscal year variant in SAP can be used by several company codes.
You have the following options for defining fiscal year variants in SAP:
- Same as calendar year
- Different from calendar year. The posting periods can also be different to the calendar months.
You define your fiscal year variants in Customizing for Financial Accounting as follows:
Path for defining fiscal year variant in SAP:
Path : Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > Fiscal Year > Maintain Fiscal Year Variant (Maintain Shortened Fiscal Year)
Transaction Codes : OB29
Path for assigning the Fiscal Year Variant to Company Code:
Path: SPRO > Financial Accounting > Financial Accounting Global Settings > Fiscal Year > Assign Company Code to a Fiscal Year variant
Transaction Code: OB37
You can use the standard variant K4 where the financial accounting year corresponds to January to December in a year.
In case the financial accounting year is April to March, you can use the standard fiscal year variant V3.
If you want to create a new variant then copy the existing variant and start your own variant with the character Z.
When you enter a posting, the system automatically determines the posting period.
In the general ledger, the system saves the transaction figures for all accounts for each posting period and each special period separately according to debits and credits.
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