I saw this book, “SAP Account Determination”, by Manish Patel, on the desk of one of my colleagues at work. My first reaction was, “Wow! A book on account determination…I mean, wow!” Her simple reply was, “I use it all the time.” So, I thought I would share it here since many of you are FICO users.

Patel covers the gamut of account determination in SAP. Here is a brief rundown:

Account Determination Scenarios Covered (from the TOC)

Amazon has a “Look Inside” so you can see more of table of contents…SAP Account Determination**.

I plan to read through it (it’s short, only 90 pages), so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
Byron

**Disclosure: the links to Amazon here include my affiliate code which gives me commission on any sales.

Here is the step-by-step:

1. Go to T-code KE52 and call up your profit center
2. Go to the Indicators tab and put a check in the Lock indicator
3. Save
   • Note that this will save your changes in an Inactive Status. You may be thinking that is a good thing and that you’re done…I was.  But you’re not.  If you go to FB50 or 9KE0 and try to post to that profit center, it will let you post away all day long.  One more step.
4. Click the Match stick button to Activate your new state:

Do not mess with the Validity periods unless you’ve got a good reason to.  The real key here is setting the Lock indicator and making sure that is Active.  Think of it as Actively locking your profit center .

Cheers,

Byron

As a general ledger accountant and FICO ninja, you may have come to accept the fact that SAP knows what it’s doing with that calculation and you don’t really question it.  But for a field manager whose Cash Discount comes in unexpectedly high (for CD allowed) or low (for CD earned), the easy answer is that Accounting must be missing something, and nothing would make you feel better than to check their math.

So as the FICO guru you’re stuck with explaining how this calculation works? And figuring out how you can show the details?  Let’s take the second part of that first.

Getting the Details for the P&L Adjustment Calculation?

I’m not sure if this works prior to ECC 6, but you can take a look if you’ve not made the ECC 6 leap.  Here’s a simple step-by-step to get SAP to generate a Log file of the original documents that created the P&L adjustment.  In the case of an AR adjustment (cash discount allowed), that will be a billing document.  For Cash Discount earned, that’s an AP document.  Here’s what you need to do:

1. In F.50, you’ll need to fill in the Company Code, year, and periods first (you will probably get an error if you click buttons without them filled)
2. Next, click the All Selections button (shift – F7) – this is shown in image to left.
3. Go to ‘Output Control’ at bottom of selection and put a check in ‘Log at line item level’, and give it a heading (see the last image in the post for that)
4. After you fill out your normal selection criteria and execute, you should have a log file that is viewable in SM37
5. You can download the logfile to a text file and import into Access or your tool of choice.

The value of this information is questionable, which is why SAP doesn’t just give it to you up front.  But if you’ve got an inquiring mind (or someone with one is bugging you for it), this data will let you get back to the original transactions to see exactly where these adjustments are coming from.  You’ll need to know something about the types of documents to know where you can view them, for instance, you can view the Billing Docs in VF04 for the CD Allowed lines.

How does the Profit Loss Adjustment calculation work?

So, the next question is how does this calculation work?  That depends on the type of transaction we’re dealing with.  Bear in mind that this is Class GL, not the New GL, that we’re talking about here.  My company is using Classic GL right now, so I don’t really know how this works in New GL…yet!

So, for a billing document, the AR and Cash discount originally are posted to your dummy profit center.  When you run F.50 to transfer the Cash Discount (F.5D for transferring the AR), the system looks at the original document and pulls the correct profit center from there, transferring the amounts from the Dummy Profit Center to the correct one.

On the AP side, Cash Discount may be using the GR/IR document for the profit center, but I’m not 100% sure.

UPDATE: Note – Run F.50 Only Once per Period

The Application Help in SAP warns that the program may only be run once per Period.  You can run it for separate company codes and probably accounts, but it should only be run once per combination.  If you do attempt to run it again, it will generate the following warning:

Note that you could hit enter and go on through the Warning message, and it would create the batch input again.  The problem is that you’d probably have duplicate postings if you ran the batch input again.  I don’t think it reverses previous entries…if anyone has confirmation, please let me know!

I needed to capture this info for future reference, but hopefully it’ll help someone else out as well!

Cheers,
Byron

Getting Functional Area to Follow Original FA on Allocations

In both 3KE5 (3KE2 for change) – Assessment and 4KE5 (4KE2 for change) – Distributions, you need to put a functional area or a functional area set on the Senders/Receivers tab in order to get the posting to the Receiver to carry the same functional area as the Sender.  Here’s the screenshot of 4KE5:

In the example above, I used a set, FUNCT-ALL which includes all of our functional areas.  This will make sure that all functional areas are allocated, and that the Receiver postings get the same functional area as the original postings.  Originally, I thought leaving it blank would insure that all functional areas got allocated, and it did.  But the receiver postings had a blank functional area…unintended consequence.

Note that the functional area on the Receiver Tracing Factor tab indicates which functional areas will be included in determining the ratios for spread in aggregate.  It does not match up receiving functional areas with sending functional areas.  That’s kind of hard to explain without an example, so here goes:

So in this example, we have 2 profit centers with posting in 3 different functional areas.  Profit center 101 has 75% of the balance.  Note that the Receiver functional areas are not the same as the Sender FA.  When the posting occurs, all of the receiver values are aggregated by profit center and the posting occurs proportionally on the Sender’s functional areas, 1050, in this case.  Of course, back to the original message in this post, if you don’t have a functional area or set specified on the Senders/Receivers tab, it will happen the same way, except the receivers’ postings won’t get a functional area at all.

So there we go.  Most folks probably have that figured out already, but clearly not everyone

Cheers!

Byron

Here are a few tidbits from the interview to whet your appetite:

• Despite the economic crisis really hitting its stride here in early 2009, SAP isn’t experiencing a massive slowdown…still expecting double digit growth.  Apotheker did dodge around the questions around recent financial results lest he wind up in some sort of regulatory manhunt.
• Apotheker said that companies are continuing to invest in big IT, even in the face of economic calamity because of the feeling that it’s “now or never.”  It’s sort of an innovate or die mentality.
• Apotheker also said that in competition with other ERP vendors, price isn’t the deciding factor.  I thought he almost seemed a little over zealous, to the point of almost  implying it’s not much of a factor at all.  But, that would explain a lot.
• Rose asked if SAP would be a different company 5 years from now.  The answer:  of a necessity.  Business, said Leo, would be fundamentally different 5 years from.  He sees businesses moving to a network model, where companies work together in small or medium networks.  

If this is your cup of lager, then you really should check it out.  You might even get hooked on Charlie Rose too.

Cheers!

Byron

by Daxis on Flickr

A question that is often asked is, how do you get an SAP job?  There is a very simple answer to that…get some SAP experience and the rest is fairly straight forward.  Experience is a major part of the equation in the job world.  And almost everybody who has ever applied for a job has thrown up their hands at some point and screamed, “How can I get experience if they won’t hire me?”

But we do get jobs and we do get experience. It may not be easy and we may have to be creative, but it happens.

In this post, I’d like to ask you how you got your first SAP job.  Post a comment and share your experience.  If you’d like, send me an email with your story and I will post it as a guest post with a genuine link back to your blog.

We all start out without experience.   Nothing encourages people like stories about real world experiences.  Maybe your story will help somebody.

How did I get an SAP Job?

I’ll get the ball rolling by sharing my story first.  It is probably very similar to that of many people, so give me a shout out in the comments if this sounds familiar to you.

I probably shouldn’t go this far back, but it’s my blog and I like telling the story

From English Teacher to Invoice Processor

Back in 1996 when I first applied to the company I work for, I was a bit over educated for the position I applied for, but I was a little desperate.  I had a business degree, a couple of years towards a Masters of Divinity, and I was doing student teaching for a secondary school English certificate in the state of Texas, one education course shy of the finish line.  I was teaching 10th, 11th, and 12th graders English and lit. in an inner city school in Ft. Worth.

What I discovered was that I loved grammar and literature and kids, and even teaching.  But I did not love Mickey Mouse rules and I certainly didn’t love enforcing them.  So, I applied for a job doing accounting.  There should be some irony in there somewhere. I finished student teaching on a Friday and started work as a vendor invoice processor the following Monday.

The Discovery of a Computer Junkie

Thankfully, my boss’s boss decided I might be a better fit elsewhere and they moved me to an accounting student job in short order.  I don’t think I would have survived long in the other role as it required way too much organization for me to be effective.

As an accounting student, I got a PC with Excel on it.  At the time, our company was running its accounting on a complicated spreadsheet developed in Lotus Symphony.  Symphony was DOS based, and by 1997, it had become outdated and rather ugly compared to Excel.  I had fallen in love with Excel, so I started rewriting some of the smaller spreadsheets in Excel just so they would be pretty.

This had the fortunate advantage of giving me some experience that would open several doors in my career down the road.

A Finale for Symphony

By 1999, Symphony hadn’t been supported by its publisher for several years.  Of course, at the time the whole Y2K shakedown was in full swing.  Someone in my company called the makers of the software to find out if it was Y2K compliant.  They couldn’t believe we even had to ask.  This prompted us to go looking for accounting software.

At the time, I was supervising the accounts payable department in our Richmond, VA district.  I had gained the reputation for being proficient with Excel, having built a budget system while in Dallas.  Our District VP had put in a good word for me with our Controller and this earned me a transfer to St. Louis to help implement a new General Ledger package called Clarus (a product later bought by Geac).

Clarus was the first step for our company to move from the most bizarre means of accounting imaginable to something remotely similar to what you might find in a text book.

Enter SAP

In 2001, the company was running out of space on it’s Bull mainframes.  There was a lot of doubt about whether we could replace our in-house developed Sales and Inventory system with an off the shelf ERP, and we gave our consultants and the ERP vendors a rough time selling us on it.  After 9 months of arduous due diligence, we decided on SAP.

From a selfish standpoint I was elated.  The experience we were all about to gain from working with SAP was about to significantly enhance our market value on the open job market.  When I was chosen to be the GL guy on the implementation team, I was even more extatic.  Voila!  My first SAP job and real live implementation experience.

Eighteen months later, we went live with a major implementation of SAP, and I transitioned back to Corporate Accounting with responsibility for our accounting and financial reporting systems.  After a few years there, I have transitioned back to IT.  I have found that having business and technical expertise puts you in a unique position to bridge the divide between IT and the business.

The Moral of my Story

I imagine that a lot of you got your feet wet with SAP in a similar fashion.  If you’re lucky enough to be at a company implementing SAP or Oracle and you get on the implementation team, the experience you get is priceless.  Don’t get me wrong, being on an implementation may not always be pleasant.  The deadlines, budgets, personality, and stresses can take a toll, but it is a priceless experience.

You don’t have to find a company that is going through a new implementation to get SAP experience.  To get the experience you need for an SAP job, you might just find a company running SAP and work to get a non-IT functional job in the area that appeals most to you.  Companies usually provide their end users with pretty thorough training.  Once you master how to use SAP, you can start angling for positions within your IT organization to work on configuration or as a Business Process Expert.

One thing to bear in mind is that adding technical skills to functional business process skills makes for a killer combination.  In today’s SAP, it pays to understand the business processes in addition to the technical details of configuring the system.

With over 40,000 companies out ther running SAP, there are lots of opportunities to get the kind of SAP experience that will help you land that first SAP technical job.  You have to try really hard to find a major company today that isn’t running SAP or Oracle or JDE. 

In a Nutshell

In simplest terms, don’t be afraid to take the long view for getting where you want to go.  You should certainly apply with consulting firms for the jobs you want, but don’t be discouraged if they are looking for people with experience.  You may find that getting real world business experience in an SAP environment gives you an even greater edge than going straight into consulting or IT.

The End-User job world is wide open to solid people with solid abilities.  Companies will teach you how to use SAP.  If there is a functional area that you are particularly interested in, be it Finance and Accounting, Purchasing, Logistics, etc, then work to get a job in your chosen area as an end user.  Once you’re in, your aptitude and interest in working with the system will differentiate you from your peers and move you in your desired direction.

Let Us Hear From You!

To those of you who are SAP veterans, let us hear your story.  Leave a comment…or if you’d like to do a guest post and get a link to your blog, send me your story in an email to byron@whypad.com and I’ll put it up as a guest post upon approval, of course.

To those of you hoping to land some SAP related employment, Good Luck!  While the US and global economies have been suffering in a bad way, the global SAP market for skilled workers continues to demand more workers than are readily available.

Good luck!

Byron

SAP has IFRS Experience that is Second to None

SEC Chairman Cox

US Companies running SAP will benefit from the mounds of experience SAP has with IFRS.  Currently, all of Europe and about 100 other countries are on IFRS, with Europe being a huge market for SAP.  Non-accelerated filers with the SEC will have the further advantage of having their accelerated filer brethren making the upgrade 1-2 years before them.  By then, SAP and its integration partners should have the implementation process for US companies down cold. There should actually be some best…I mean…leading, or whatever the PC term is today…practices defined by that point.

Also, by 2014 most, if not all, of SAP’s customers will be on ECC6 or later.  This does not necessarily mean they will all be on the “New GL” available in ECC6, but at least 4.6 & 4.7 should be aberrations in the customer landscape.  That said, what will be the options available to US companies that are converting from GAAP to IFRS?

One of the potential requirements will be to run GAAP and IFRS in parallel for some time period in order to shake down systems and to have a solid basis for the 3 years of comparative reports. These are some of the possibilities for making that happen…if you have actual experience in making the conversion, please tell us about it in the comments.

Converting to IFRS from GAAP in SAP

• Parallel ledgers in ECC6′s New GL.  I don’t know the details of how this works, but I hear that it’s possible and potentially the recommended path…right now.  Under this method, about 2 years before your IFRS year, you would have a GL for GAAP and a GL for IFRS.  This would  allow you to report GAAP until you are required to report IFRS and you would be building the 2 historical years of comparative data
• Multiple Company Codes in either the new GL or the “Classic GL” (the one in 4.6 & 4.7 which can also be used in ECC6).  Again, I’m not sure how this would work, but you would potentially need to configure you system to double-post transactions, once to a GAAP company code and once to an IFRS CoCode.  I don’t even know if this is possible in 4.6.
• New general ledger accounts for IFRS transactions.  In this scenario, you would create special GL accounts that would handle transactions requiring different treatment under IFRS.  This would allow you to roll up your accounts differently in reporting for GAAP and IFRS purposes.  This has the drawback of junking up your GL with accounts that will not be needed after the cutover to IFRS.  Additionally, it might be difficult to run both sets of accounting rules in the same ledger.  It just doesn’t seem like a very clean or elegant solution, but who knows?
• Consolidations.  You may be able to use consolidations to translate from GAAP to IFRS.  Many companies may already be familiar with this if they are taking subsidiaries books from an IFRS country and translating them to GAAP.
• BW or reporting.  As with consolidations, you might be able to make the translation from GAAP to IFRS through reporting tools.  This might be fairly tricky if you’re on LIFO or some of the other quirky GAAP practices.

I hope to keep refining this list as I learn more.  That said, I welcome your comments to help me refine the list!

Cheers,

Byron

Jimmy Wales Headlines TechEd 2008

This year, SAP had web celeb Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in to kick off the 2008 TechEd event in Las Vegas with a keynote on Monday night.  So, how was it?  Well, I don’t know what his reputation as a speaker is, but it wasn’t exactly a Steve Jobs level performance.  What he lacked in pizzazz, however, he made up for with his personal substance.

I’ve watched more than a few presentations from folks like Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates over the internet, but this was my first in-person celebrity speaker, so I was kind of hoping to be blown away.  It was good…just didn’t blow me away.  It is worth a listen if you’ve got an hour…sorry, the link is a stream, so you can’t download to your iPod (though Google could probably tell you how).  Here’s the link to the Jimmy Wales TechEd keynote.

Here’s a short list of accomplishments that SAP listed when introducing Jimmy:

• Creator of Wikipedia
• WikiMedia Foundation
• Founded Wikia.com in 2004
• Wikia Search
• Pioneer Award from EFF
• 12th on 2007 Forbes Web Celeb List
• 2008 co-chaired annual World Economic Forum in Middle East
• Board of Social Text
• Board of Creative Commons

With a to-do list like that, it’s a wonder he has time for an SAP event.

Some Wikipedia stats:

• 280,000+ volunteers
• 10M+ articles
• 150+ languages
• 31% of all internet users use it

Jimmy talked about the very humble beginnings of Wikipedia.  He started out in 2000 working on a free encyclopedia project called Nupedia and became frustrated with the “top-down” nature of that project where the articles were written by experts without user/community input.  In 2001, he did a restart with Wikipedia using the quintessential Web 2.0 notion of community produced content.  Check out the full timeline of Wikipedia’s history on, where else but, Wikipedia here.

Wikia and Other Projects

The idea of community being in control was very much a focus of Wale’s talk.  His new projects are also centered around that.  Wikia is one of his primary projects today, focused on allowing people to create topic focused wikis as well as democratizing search. The vision for Wikia is: To become the world’s largest sustainable, free-content, user controlled media company..

Frankly, if Wikia can get its kinks worked out on search, it provides some really awesome features that put the community in control of the search algorithm.

He discussed several of these briefly, including:

• Users can annotate results
• Edit the results text
• Star results to reorder results ranking for a given search term
• Highlight a result, allowing other users to see your highlighted result item

But let’s face it.  If any of these features ends up working, Google can have them in place with the single flex of a pinky.

One very cool thing Wikia are doing is using a tool called Grub to create a distributed web crawler.  Instead of having their servers crawl the web by themselves, they are hoping people will help them out like the Folding@home project, to use spare compute cycles (and bandwidth) to crawl the web for them.

Philosophy of Benevolence in Design

A guiding philosophy behind Jimmy’s work is what he calls “benevolence in design”.  You can see it completely at work in Wikipedia.  Benevolence in design says that most people are going to do the Right thing most of the time, so design your applications around that belief.

Now, if you’re an SAP guy and you’ve got any touch points with GRC (and even if you don’t), you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Over my fired, fried, and forgotten body!”

Well, you’ve got a point there when you’re talking about building software that is going to drive something that is regulated by SOX or the FDIC, the FDA, FAA, FCC, or pretty much anything that the government is going to take a good hard look at.

Benevolence…not Something They Teach in Business Schools

While benevolence by design says that you should build in means of fixing things when people step off the deep end and do something bad, this is usually not going to work in the business world where you have bosses or government agents who don’t fully appreciate the incredible benefits of living in a world where there are no locks on the doors that prevent people from doing random acts of kindness at will.

I saw this funny commercial last night.  This young woman was trying to sell her boss on some Green initiative (some tech company as I recall), and the boss was saying:

“That will be great news for the tree huggers and the greenies.  But my bosses don’t eat granola.”

That sentiment probably roundly applies to those of us in business software today where Benevolence in Design would be the issue versus energy savings.  Our bosses don’t really hold hands and sing campfire songs.

But let’s assume that we are running a business that is controlled and run by the community.  What benefits does this philosophy hold for our applications?  Here are a few:

• You erect no barriers that would discourage wide participation in building content and community
• You actually invite fanatical participation from people who want to ensure that their special areas of interest are not molested
• You build a society that appreciates the comfort of knowing that people are playing by the rules and when they don’t, they are discretely removed if they are incorrigible

One of my favorite quotes from Jimmy’s speech was:  Human life is possible at scale.  Ultimately, he’s right.  When we live in the context of each other, we have a mutually beneficial incentive for doing the right thing.  And ultimately, that’s really what SOX is trying to do in what some would call a Draconian fashion…bringing visibility to the goings and doings of business.

Thanks for a good talk, Jimmy.  I hope you wildly succeed in your vision: for everyone on earth to have free (as in speech and beer) access to the sum of human knowledge.

Byron

In addition, here is the link to SAP’s official Statement of Direction for its planning tools.

Here are the highlights of Ryan’s post (please see the full post here):

1. Ryan says that the simple answer on BPC is: “SAP recommends all new planning implementations use SAP BPC.”
2. BI-IP will be supported in its current form until 2013…this confirms everything I’ve seen or read.  BPC is intended as the long-term go-forward product.  SAP will continue to build upon BI-IP as a “planning engine” rather than a planning interface/toolset.
3. BPC will be released using 2 different technology stack options:  BI Netweaver based; Microsoft SQL Server based.  The Netweaver based option will leverage many of the technologies and features found in BI-IP as well as the broader Netweaver stack.
4. BPC will not be a mere front-end to BI-IP.  It is intended to be a complete planning solution.
5. Ryan addresses BPC scalability concerns, saying that this has not been a legitimate issue, even utilizing SQL Server technology (SSIS) – the caveat being that this is true when BPC is used as a Performance Management tool.  Under the Netweaver stack, BPC will inherit the scalability of that technology.  BI Accelerator support is planned, further enhancing scalability.
6. SAP is evaluating the possibility of creating migration tools from BI-IP or BPS to BPC.  This didn’t sound promising, but they are looking at it.

Thanks again to Ivan for pointing us to the treasure trove of information.

Happy planning!

Byron

The trick is that you have to Create a new version of the cost center. Here are the steps (as if you really needed them ):

Creating a New Version of Cost Center with New Vailidity Dates

1. Go to t-code: KS01
2. Enter the old cost center # in the Cost Center field
3. Enter the new Valid from & Valid To dates. Note: these dates cannot overlap with the existing dates
4. You probably want to create with Reference, so enter the same cost center # in the Reference section.
5. Hit the Master data button and tweak to taste…you’re done!