General Ledger Accounting (FI-GL)

The main purpose of general ledger accounting is to fully represent external accounting and the accounts involved in it. Recording all business transactions (primary postings as well as settlements from internal accounting) in a software system that is fully integrated with all the other operational areas of a company ensures that the accounting data is always complete and accurate.

• In General Ledger Accounting, you can perform parallel accounting by running several parallel ledgers (general ledgers) for different accounting principles.
• General Ledger Accounting supports the segment reports required by the accounting principles IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and US GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). 
• You can perform cost of sales accounting in General Ledger Accounting. For this purpose, General Ledger Accounting contains the Functional Area dimension.

Scenario in General Ledger Accounting

What are some existing extension ledger use cases

Predictive Accounting

Statistical Sales Conditions

Statistical Sales Conditions are transferred to Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) at sales order billing to increase and improve information relevant for management reporting in Finance.

With this feature, you can transfer statistical pricing conditions of customer invoices to Financial Accounting (FI) by using the regular interface between Sales Billing (SD-BIL) and Financial Accounting. Note that only statistical pricing conditions with status Active can be transferred to CO-PA.

In the control data for a pricing procedure, select the Relevant for Account Determination indicator for a statistical price condition. This statistical price condition is then posted as a journal entry to an extension ledger of Financial Accounting.

• Assign both a debit and a credit account to the account key. Use columns 'G/L Account' and 'Accruals Account'.Sales and Distribution Basic Functions Account Assignment/Costing Revenue Account Determination Assign G/L Accounts

Create or reuse extension ledger(s) of extension ledger type P Line items with technical numbers / no deletion possible to record postings for Statistical Sales Conditions.

Posting during Invoicing. You notice a second accounting document posted on Extension Ledger ZZ.

This is the provision posting for warranty costs coming from the statistical sales condition.

Purchase Commitments

Commitments Management functionality in SAP S/4HANA updates purchasing commitments in the extension ledger.  A Purchasing commitment represents an obligation to pay a vendor for the future delivery of goods or services. Commitments are triggered when a purchase requisition or purchase order is created in the system. At this point, there are no actual payments recorded against GL accounts, but a reservation (commitment) should be made against the budget.  The activation of commitments updates in Universal Journal makes sense especially in relation to the new Budget availability control available since the 1909 release. Until release 1809 commitments were stored in the dedicated line items table COOI, totals were stored in the table COSP. Since S4HANA 1809, the commitments now update Universal Journal (table ACDOCA). In order to distinguish them from actuals, they are stored in a separate extension ledger which must be defined as a prediction ledger. For compatibility reasons, commitments are continued to be updated in the old commitments tables as well. 

For further details, please refer to SAP Note 2778793 – Constraints with New Commitments Management Solution .