Business processes and posting transaction tips in SAP FI-AA

Excerpt from SAP® Fixed Assets Accounting (FI-AA)
by Jörg Siebert. 

Business Processes and Posting Transactions
“There are many ways to achieve a goal.” Staying
true to this motto, in this chapter we will present various SAP transactions for everyday business transactions or postings.

Within a company, the asset accountant talks to and corresponds with people from many different departments, gathering the information that he needs. This cross-organizational fact is reflected as a division of work in many SAP transactions that you will become familiar with later in examples, particularly for acquisition postings. With no claim to completeness, the following are important departments with points of contact with asset accounting:

• Accounts payable accounting
• Accounts receivable accounting
• Vehicle fleet
• Insurance management

In this chapter, we will present the resulting SAP Asset Accounting postings using practice-related business transactions. You will become familiar with the various
SAP transactions and will then be able to use them in your daily work. Our objective is also to show an overview of different alternative transactions for one business transaction, with the corresponding advantages and disadvantages. We will address five main topics:

• Acquisition
• Transfer posting
• Retirement
• Transfer
• Write-up

We will present different variants of the individual SAP transactions and business transactions. For example, you can post acquisitions via a clearing account, integrated
with Accounts Payable Accounting, or even integrated with Materials Management. In addition to the incoming invoice, complete or partial credit memos are important. We will also consider individual aspects such as amount rounding or subsequent acquisitions in the same fiscal year. Highlighted tips and error messages created deliberately should help you to master every individual business transaction.
4.1 Acquisition
You create the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year, and at this point in time at the latest, you have to define and value the new objects added to fixed assets. Traditionally therefore, asset accounting was/is oriented on financial statements. Usually, for assets acquired during the year, the assumed acquisition and production costs were posted to the asset accounts in financial accounting
or to clearing accounts. Therefore, there was no movement in asset accounting itself. The only benefit of this is a time-saving.

As a result, around the end of the fiscal year there was always a flurry of activity in accounting departments. The information mentioned above has to be obtained; at
some point in the fiscal year, the clearing accounts (e. g., for acquisition postings) have to be credited. This means that every transaction has to be processed again, every document looked at again and posted.

This procedure not only causes unnecessary personnel costs: the willingness of the accounting department to provide information is limited for clearing postings during
the year. As a result of the postings to clearing accounts during the fiscal year, the balance sheet and profit and loss statement are not very informative. This procedure
also makes the verification or proof of acquisition and production costs more difficult. All of the information mentioned above has to be queried. All documents have to be looked at again. Considering the disadvantages of traditional asset accounting, which relied heavily on clearing accounts, it is clear why there are multiple transactions for the same content (acquisition or retirement) in the SAP system.

In SAP Asset Accounting, you can post and document acquisition postings with three different methods. Figure 4.1 shows an overview of the methods with the respective
degree of integration.

Figure 4.1: Overview

Keep reading in SAP Fixed Assets Accounting (FI-AA) by Jörg Siebert.

Drawing up a balance sheet means presenting the values of the assets and liabilities of a company. A considerable proportion of the assets are fixed assets. Here you will learn what fixed assets are, how the value of fixed assets has to be reported, and how SAP Asset Accounting can support you. This book focuses on

– Processes and Functions in SAP ERP Financials
– Posting Examples and Integration to General Ledger Accounting
– Validation and Reporting for IFRS
– Periodic Activities

Author Jörg Siebert has 20 years of experience working with SAP Financials and is an internationally recognized author, speaker, trainer, and veteran SAP consultant. He has worked throughout Europe in the automotive, healthcare, and service industries and regularly delivers sessions at international SAP conferences. Previously, Jörg was a product manager for SAP ERP Financials at SAP German headquarters. He is the Co-founder and Managing Director of Espresso Tutorials, a publishing company focused on short and concise SAP textbooks.