General Ledger and the Universal Journal in SAP S/4HANA: Ledgers, Currencies, Segments and Period-End

What you will learn

• Explain how one posting is stored as ACDOCA lines per ledger, company code, fiscal year, document number and line.
• Choose between a standard ledger and an extension ledger for a second accounting principle and justify it.
• Design currency types and account types so that amounts are never summed across currency fields.
• Post a journal entry in Post General Journal Entries and read it in Manage Journal Entries and in I_JournalEntryItem.
• Specify the three mandatory filters of a Datasphere model on the Universal Journal.

Concept overview

In SAP S/4HANA the general ledger is no longer a summary layer fed by sub-ledgers. It is the Universal Journal: one line-item store, table ACDOCA, in which financial accounting and management accounting data are recorded in a single chart of accounts and share the same line items (Universal Journal, SAP Help). M413 covers the data model itself; this module is about what a finance consultant or an analytics architect has to configure and read on top of it: ledgers, currency types, account types, segments and profit centres, document splitting, and the period-end basics.

The answer to "where does a number come from" is therefore always the same chain: a journal entry header (BKPF in the compatibility view, document number BELNR), its lines in ACDOCA keyed by ledger RLDNR, company code RBUKRS, fiscal year GJAHR, document number BELNR and line DOCLN, and the released CDS view I_JournalEntryItem that exposes those lines to apps and extractors. Parallel accounting and multiple currencies are available throughout the Universal Journal, which is why a reconciliation between "local GAAP" and "IFRS" becomes a filter on the ledger column instead of a data-extraction project.

What this means in practice on a Monday morning:

Prerequisites

• M413 (S/4HANA data model and ACDOCA) and M414 (CDS and VDM).
• Basic accounting vocabulary: debit, credit, company code, fiscal year.
• Access to an S/4HANA appliance from the SAP Cloud Appliance Library or an equivalent sandbox.

Outcomes

• You can state which ledger a figure comes from and reproduce it per ledger and currency.
• You can decide between standard and extension ledger with stated criteria.
• You can explain why group-currency amounts do not change when rates change afterwards.
• You can diagnose an unassigned segment line as a document splitting issue.
• You can write the extraction rules for I_JournalEntryItem into a finance data product.