Technical Articles
How to Add Fiscal Year Variants in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
You most probably know that fiscal year variants (FYV) define the relationship between the calendar year and the fiscal year in SAP S/4 HANA Cloud. They specify the start and end date and the number of periods and special periods of a fiscal year.
As your business requirements might change when your system is already up and running, you might run into a situation where you have to use additional fiscal years, because you need local reporting for a country that differs from your main fiscal year. This means that you have to add a fiscal year variant to your system that has not been part of your initial implementation project.
While it has been possible to add alternative fiscal year variants for a long time, there’s good news: The procedure has been substantially simplified and enhanced as of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208.
In a nutshell, you can now use the Assign Fiscal Year Variants to Ledgers and Company Codes configuration activity to assign the alternative fiscal year variant to your non-leading ledger.
Now let’s have a closer look at an example of how you can add an alternative fiscal year variant:
General prerequisites
An alternative FYV can only be set for company codes assigned to a non-leading ledger.
This means that your existing ledgers and accounting principles must be assigned as in the example below, or, if you are implementing a new system, you must make the assignment accordingly in the Assign Accounting Principles to Ledger configuration activity:
What’s more, the alternative FYV can only be assigned to a company code in which no journal entries have been entered yet. That is, if you are working in a 2-system landscape, no journal entries must exist in the quality and in the productive systems, or, if you are working in a 3-system landscape, no journal entries must exist in the development and productive systems.
For more information on what you need to take into consideration, see Restrictions and Dependencies.
Business roles and apps required
- Business role template for user role: Configuration Expert – Business Process Configuration (SAP_BR_BPC_EXPERT)
- Configuration Activity: Assign Fiscal Year Variants to Ledgers and Company Codes (ID 105409)
Further apps that are needed for posting period settings:
-
- Manage Posting Period Variants
- Manage Posting Periods
Configuration activity Assign Fiscal Year Variants to Ledgers and Company Codes
Depending on your configuration landscape, you can either find the Assign Fiscal Year Variants to Ledgers and Company Codes configuration activity using SAP Central Business Configuration or the Manage Your Solution app.
In this example, ledger 0L – as the leading ledger – is assigned to the group accounting principle and K4 is selected as the common fiscal year variant.
You need to enter the alternative fiscal year variant, which is V3 in this example, for the related company code(s) with ledger 2L as the non-leading ledger. In addition, you need to assign a posting period variant. If you need a new posting period variant, please contact SAP using the Worldwide Customer Requests Repository (WCR). For more information, see SAP Knowledge Base Article 3012991.
Alternative Fiscal Year Variant and Asset Accounting
If you are interested in the alternative fiscal year variant regarding asset accounting, you can find information including examples here.
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And last but not least, we’ve put together the following materials to help guide you through the process:
- Central access point for the alternative fiscal year variants including information on application components: Alternative Fiscal Year Variant
- Go to the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer for the following materials:
- Supported Fiscal Year Variants
- Finance – Conduct Workshop
- Fiscal Year Variant Implementation Guide
- 3169537 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Release Restriction Note for the Alternative Fiscal Year Variant
Thanks Verena, it helps a lot!
Dear Verena,
In above KBA3169537, I noticed the comment in General Part
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However, in your example, FV K4 assigned to Leading ledger 0L and FV V3 assigned to non leading ledger 2L. Posting period start dates and posting period end dates of K4 and V3 are different.
May I know your suggestion if we are able to use an alternative fiscal year variant with different Posting period start dates and posting period end dates of common fiscal year variant, or different posting periods like 17 posting periods?
Many thanks,
Yang
Hi Yang,
thank you for this important question!
What we mean by equal length and corresponding start and end dates of posting periods is that the period borders must match. This means that, for example, as in K4 and V3, a posting period starts with the first day of a month and ends with the last day of this month. A posting period with a differing pattern would be, for example, a posting period variant consisting of 4 weeks. Even if the start date would be the first day of the month, the last day of the period would be the 28th (and not the last day of a calendar month). This would not work in combination with K4 or V3.
Does this make it any clearer?
Best regards,
Verena