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Account Determination and the GL Account Detective !

In an integrated ERP system such as SAP, it is far more common to have financial postings
generated by a non-finance module rather than from FI or CO. Since most business
transactions with financial impact occur between your company and your business partners,
this seems like a logical consequence.

That is where the concept of SAP Account Determination comes into play: every SAP
module that will at some point generate business transactions with financial impact offers
one way or another to determine the GL account(s) that should be posted to. The concept
may sound simple but the whole topic is not that straight forward. The interested reader
could find helpful a book which was published in 2007 and is fully dedicated to this subject:
SAP Account Determination, by Manish Patel, ISBN: 1592291104/9781592291106.

You should also bear in mind that, due to its nature, this topic lies at the module-interfaces
and, very often, at the very edge of the SAP consultants expertise. In some cases you will
even notice that account determination issues are ping-pong ed back and forth among
the consultants, which certainly does not do much good in solving them.

Heres a short list of some example Account Determination transaction codes: in SD
transactions VKOA and OV64, in MM transaction OBYC, in HR transaction OBYE. Even in FI
you have many such transaction codes like OBXM, OBXL etc. and the list goes on

So, thats the basics of SAP s Account Determination. Now a question that an FI consultant
will come across very often is where to find out how an FI posting is generated? How (via
which module/transaction code) is a GL account determined by the system? Finance users
will come to you with an FI posting and wonder why that particular account is posted,
instead maybe of another. A few months or years after the Go Live such questions occur
often, right? And no-one seems to have the answers or the relevant documentation!

This QuickTip is about a very simple SAP report that will show you at a push of the button
where a GL account is determined from: this is the Account Detective! The transaction
code for this report is S_ALR_87101048 and the selection screen is shown in Figure 1:







Copyright SAP-Consultant.gr. All rights reserved.

Figure 1: The Account Detective


Running this report for the required account(s) will help you find out which module has
configured the particular GL accounts, which should then help you address the issue to the
right consultants.




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