Blog series on Define Compliance Reports: Create a New Reporting Activitiy

This blog post is a part of the multi-part series of blogs on the Define Compliance Reports application. In the set of blog posts, we cover the end-to-end process of creation and interconnection of various artifacts required for reporting compliance via SAP Document and Reporting Compliance – Statutory Reporting (Formerly ACR). In this blog post, we will cover how to create a “reporting activity”.

Statutory reporting entails more than the generation and submission of legal reports to tax authorities. To achieve end-to-end legal reporting compliance, a business needs to perform pre-steps and post-steps such as checking data compliance, adopting custom business processes, clearing tax documents after submission of legal reports, etc. In ACR, these steps can be created via “reporting activities”.

There are standard reporting activities such as Manage tax Items or Post Tax payables delivered out of the box. In addition to this, you can create reporting activities and assign them to reports as per requirements.

In this blog post, we will create a new reporting activity to check the sanity of accounting documents used to generate legal reports. We will use SAP Tax Compliance for SAP S/4 HANA to check documents. SAP Tax Compliance for SAP S/4 HANA is part of SAP Assurance and Compliance Software for SAP S/⁠4HANA which provides support for tax compliance checks. More info about SAP Tax Compliance can be found here. You can also choose to add any other fiori application (standard or custom) as a reporting activity in ACR.

Let’s create a new reporting activity step-by-step.

1. Open Define Compliance Reports application. Go to Reporting Activity and choose Add.
2. Enter Reporting Activity ID. Choose Continue.
3. The reporting activity creation screen appears with two sections – General Properties and Parameters.
4. In the General Properties section, enter Description. As we want to create reporting activity with SAP Tax Compliance Fiori application, let’s choose “SAP Fiori Application” as Reporting Activity Type.SAP S/4HANA On-Premise customers can choose ABAP Programs as well.
5. We need to enter the corresponding Semantic Object and Action. For standard Fiori apps, you can find these details on the Fiori apps library If you choose ABAP Program as Reporting Activity Type, enter the ABAP Program name. (Only applicable for S/4 HANA On-Premise Solution )
6. Now let’s add a Parameter. During report execution in Run Advanced Compliance Reports app, these values are passed to the reporting activity.In this example, we want to select documents that are relevant only for the period for which legal document is generated. Hence, we will create two parameters n “Y_START_DATE” and “Y_END_DATE” and map them with reporting dates.Similarly, add another parameter “Y_END_DATE”Next, we need to map parameters with period for which legal report will be generated.To Map reporting period, start date to parameter “Y_START_DATE”:a. Go to details of parameterb. Select data source as System. In ACR there are system parameters for period start date and end date. We will map the same for both parameters.c. Click on ok.
7. Activate reporting activity.

The reporting activity is now activated. You can reuse this reporting activity as a pre-step activity for multiple reports. You can follow this blog post on how to reuse activities in ACR Reports

In this blog post, we learned about the ACR reporting activity concept and steps to create it from scratch using the Define Compliance report app.

If you have any questions/queries, please post here.