Changing Fiscal Year Variants/ Shortened (Extended) Fiscal Year

Your company got aquired by a company with a deferred calendar year? Usually this is the time, when you might need to think of changing the fiscal year variant.

You search in the help and get the following article: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-48723. As suggested you raise a ticket and ask for support and it will be closed immediately, because your company does not use company defined fiscal year variants, but “10-Calendar Year Equals Fiscal Year”.

What other option do you have now?

During the last years I was contacted by different projects for support. After trying out various approaches I believe that setting up a new company with the new fiscal year variant is the best of all. And somehow the company is a new company. They have not only to use a different fiscal year variant, but maybe also a subsequent set of books (company set of books?). They maybe now belong to a tax group. They have different processes etc.

What would be the necessary steps to achieve this:

Request a new test tenant
Create a new company in the new tenant in parallel to the old company
Advantage: master data can be re-used, at least the company independent part;
historical data are still available
Create the new Set of Books
Fiscal year variant is a key field for the Set of Books definition, that why it cannot be changed.
The Chart of Accounts, etc. can be reused.
Assign the new company to the new Set of Books
You cannot assign a subsequent Set of Books to a company after the first posting.
But even if it would be technically okay, after my evaluations I do not think, it is a good approach for a new fiscal year variant.
Extract all open transactions and migrate them to the new Set of Books
Similar to a standard migration, you need to migrate open items. For open POs and SO you need to check if you need to migrate them, re-using is no option.
For data download you can use reports and OWLs. In addition SAP offers services to extract data with tools.
Before the upload
- Please check especially with respect to Fixed Assets, that the right values are used. Also the Fixed Asset IDs cannot be re-used.
- Ensure that the old bank accounts data are not valid any longer (otherwise bank statement processing will determine the “old” bank accounts and clear old items)
Add the new company specific data to the master data for the new company.
All employees have to be transfered to the new company
unfortunately “fire and re-hire” is the only option.
Recommendation: define a new determination reason, e.g. “Reorg” to see the transfers for the re-org.
Update User Access Rights:
You have to ensure, that the employees can only create and edit data for the new company. So check the access rights of all your employees.
For self services the new cost centers will be defaulted.
Last but not least: Delimit the old company by maintaining the end date
The validity of an organizational unit is considered when creating new data. So you will get an error when creating e.g. POs for the old company.