Introduction

Have you ever wondered why there are 4 types of account available in account dimension? What are LEQ, AST, EXP and INC and what type should be used and when?

This document will show the difference in account types in SAP Business Planning and Consolidation.

Account types

There are 2 categories of accounts – Balance sheet account and Profit and Loss accounts. Each category has its corresponding account types.

Balance sheet accounts are Assets and Liabilities and Equity. The corresponding ACCTYPE are AST for Assets and LEQ for Liabilities and Equity.

Profit and Loss accounts are Income and Expenses with corresponding ACCTYPE as INC and EXP.

The difference in them is how data is assumed to be entered in BPC and how it is extracted from it.

For Balance sheet accounts the data is always entered up to the end of a period. This means that Balance sheet at the end of certain month will show the actual state of a company in a financial year.

For Profit and Loss accounts, data in a certain month is entered as movement. It means that data in a month will show what a company has earned/lost only in this month.

Example

How let’s have a look at all this on a sample data in BPC.

Balance sheet accounts

For the sake of simplicity we will look at account dimension only. Account dimension has Balance Sheet accounts and Profit and Loss accounts.

Please notice that Balance Sheet accounts are of type AST and LEQ, which stand for Assets and Liability and equity.

Assets account is a total of Cash and Accounts Receivable, Liabilities and Equity is a total of all liabilities and equities of a company.

A sum of the both account should be equal to zero and this should be shown at the very top Balance account.

Let’s have a look at data. Let’s say we are interested in data for Nov, Dec 2012 and total balance for 2012.

A sample data is entered above for Nov 2012. The data shows that balance is 0.

The balance in November shows the state of the company by the end of Nov 2012, which means it is not the balance only for one month (Nov 2012) but a “cumulative” balance of the company for 2012 by the end of Nov 2012.

Thus, when data is entered in Dec 2012 it will show the balance Dec and the whole year.

Please have a look at 2012.Total which equals to 2012.Dec. These are correct figures.

Now, let’s have a look at the same figures at a bit different angle. What will we see when looking at Periodic vs YTD for Nov, Dec and Total? Will the figures sum up? No. This is because it is a balance sheet accounts.

Here is the same example for Periodic and YTD view.

Profit and Loss accounts

Moving to Profit and Loss accounts. Here they are in account dimension. Please notice that P&L accounts are of INC and EXP account type. They stand for Income and Expense correspondingly.

Above is a very simple example of P&L accounts. The company has profit and costs. Profit minus Costs is what the company has at the end of a period as a profit (if the result is positive) or loss (if the result is negative). The sum is shown at PL account. Let’s have a look at PL for the same period of time (Nov, Dec, Total).

In Nov the company sold products for 100 currency units (cu) and had a cost of sales of 50 cu. In Nov the company finished with total profit of 50 cu. (100 + (-50) = 50). These figures show movement of money just in Nov. (we assume the company did nothing in Jan-Oct 2012).

In Dec the company sold products for 200 cu having costs of 50 cu. The total for Dec would be 150.

The data above shows that 2012.Total adds up figures for Nov and Dec, which is correct. This is showing the total result of the company in regards to profit. The company made 50 cu in Nov plus 150 cu in Dec which is 200 cu totally in 2012.

Now let’s have a look at Periodic vs YTD for PL accounts.

Please notice that Periodic figures for Dec do not match YTD figures in Dec. This is because for YTD view we want to see how much money the company made/lost by the end of a certain period (Dec in this case). For YTD Dec that would be PL 50 + 150 = 200, Profit 100 + 200 = 300 and Cost 50 + 50 = 100.

Sign of data for in BPC and BW (BPC NW)

Let’s have a look at with what sign data is stored at BW level for different types of accounts.

The table of input sign at BPC level, corresponding BW sign.

Let’s have a look at sample data to see the signs at BPC level (input and reporting) and BW. Here is BPC input data and BW in one table.