Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Reporting
A question that came up both during my Q&A session last month and my presentation in the Reporting & Analytics conference concerned the use of characteristics such as WBS elements for document splitting. The standard scenarios that exist in the SAP General Ledger contain the profit center, segment and business area fields which can be defined as document splitting characteristics so that full balance sheet reporting can be made by those dimensions. However, there is no scenario that contains the WBS element field (PSPNR) and hence you cannot readily define this field for document splitting. Some organizations use the project systems module heavily in their SAP landscape, and it may be more important to see full balance sheets by WBS element rather than the other fields that are available.
To accomplish this, you would need to add the WBS element field as a customer enhancement field in the SAP General Ledger totals table FAGLFLEXT. You can do this by going to transaction FAGL_GINS enter totals table FAGLFLEXT and hit the ‘Change’ button. Then in the ‘Field Name’ column, enter the value “ZZPS_PSP_PNR”(the prefix “ZZ” is the naming convention required for defining customer fields) and save and activate the setting. You can then go to the following confi guration menu path (transaction SPRO) to add the WBS element field to your relevant ledgers:
Financial Accounting (New) -> Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) -> Ledgers -> Ledger -> Define Scenarios and Customer Fields to Ledgers
You can then highlight the relevant ledger, double-click on the ‘Customer Fields’ folder and click on the “New Entries” button to add the field to your ledger. You would then need to define the WBS element field as a document splitting characteristic. To do so go to the configuration menu path:
Financial Accounting (New) -> General Ledger Accounting (New) -> Business Transactions -> Document Splitting -> Define Document Splitting Characteristics for General Ledger Accounting
You can then click on ‘New Entries’ select the WBS Element field and then check the ‘Zero balance’ box (if you want every document to be balanced per WBS element) and the ‘Mandatory’ checkbox (if you want to the system to issue an error message if a WBS element does not exist in a document). You need to be aware that by checking the zero balance checkbox, the system will post as many extra lines as is necessary to make sure that all WBS elements in a document are balanced to zero.
If you have several WBS elements in a document, this will create several extra lines every time this document is processed. You therefore need to decide if it is worth performing zero-balancing at that level or if you can use a more summarized characteristic such as profit center or segment (which all WBS elements can be assigned to) to produce full balanced sheets. In order that every transaction contains a WBS element, you would need to enable the field status of this field in the general ledger accounts’ field status variants (by using transaction OBC4).
Once the WBS element field is available in the FAGLFLEXT table, you can pull it into the relevant SAP General Ledger reports such as Report Painter, Drilldown reports and Business Information reports.
For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP which is published by SAP Press.