SAP FI

FI captures every financially-relevant business event, invoices, payments, goods movements with value, into the general ledger and sub-ledgers, and produces the balance sheet, profit-and-loss and legal financial statements. It is about external reporting and compliance, per legal entity (company code).

• General Ledger (G/L): the central record of accounts.
• Accounts Payable (AP): vendor invoices and payments.
• Accounts Receivable (AR): customer invoices and receipts.
• Asset Accounting (AA): fixed assets and depreciation.
• Bank Accounting: bank transactions and reconciliation.

Configuration sits under Financial Accounting in the IMG, reached with SPRO. Three settings decide almost everything else and they are made once, at the start: the chart of accounts, the fiscal year variant and the posting period variant. Change them later and you are into a conversion project, not a config change.

Day to day you will use FS00 for a general ledger account master, FB50 to post a journal directly, FB60 for a vendor invoice and FB70 for a customer invoice. F110 runs the automatic payment program. FB03 displays any document and FAGLL03 lists general ledger line items, which is where most investigations actually start.

The tables follow the header and item pattern. BKPF holds the document header and BSEG the line items. Account master data splits across SKA1 at chart of accounts level and SKB1 at company code level, which is the same idea as material master data splitting across MARA and MARC. See SAP master data for why that split exists.

Twenty minutes on a practice system, and it covers the two document types you will be asked about in any FI interview.

1. Post a vendor invoice with FB60. Pick a vendor, an expense account, an amount and a company code. Save, and note the document number.
2. Open it with FB03. Read the two lines: the expense debit and the payable credit. Nothing was posted to a bank yet, because an invoice is an obligation, not a payment.
3. Run the payment program with F110. Set a run date and identification, add the company code and payment method, propose, then run. The proposal is where you check what it intends to pay before it does.
4. Display the document again. The payable is cleared and the bank account is credited. The clearing document is a second document, linked to the first.

Do the same flow once with FB70 on the customer side and the accounts receivable half of the job stops being abstract. FB60 in detail covers the invoice screen field by field.

FI is the destination of financial postings from across SAP: a goods receipt (MM) or a billing document (SD) automatically posts to FI. It integrates tightly with CO (management accounting) via the universal journal in S/4HANA, where FI and CO share one line-item table (ACDOCA).

The mechanism worth understanding is automatic account determination. When a goods receipt posts in MM, nobody types a general ledger account: configuration in OBYC decides which account the value lands on, driven by the material valuation class and the movement type. The same happens for billing in SD. When finance asks why a posting went to the wrong account, this is almost always the answer, and it is an MM or SD configuration question wearing an FI costume.

• One chart of accounts or several. A single global chart makes group reporting simple and forces every country onto the same account structure. Local charts do the opposite. Most groups run an operating chart globally with a country chart where the law requires it.
• Document splitting on or off. Splitting gives you a balanced balance sheet by segment or profit centre. It also has to be switched on at the start and is painful to add later.
• How many ledgers. Parallel ledgers let you report under IFRS and a local GAAP from the same postings, which is cheaper than running two sets of books.
• Where the period control sits. Someone has to own OB52, and if that is nobody in particular you will find a month closed while a plant is still posting.

The general ledger holds the totals. The sub-ledgers hold the detail, and each one exists because somebody needs to answer a question the ledger alone cannot.

Accounts payable answers what we owe and to whom. Every vendor invoice posts to a reconciliation account in the general ledger and to the vendor in the sub-ledger, at the same time, from one document. That is why you cannot post directly to a reconciliation account: it would break the agreement between the two.

Accounts receivable does the same on the customer side, and carries the dunning and credit information that decides whether an order ships.

Asset accounting tracks what the company owns and depreciates it. It runs its own period logic, and depreciation posts to the ledger as a periodic run rather than per transaction.

Bank accounting is where payments meet reality, through the payment program, the bank statement and the clearing that reconciles the two.

The month-end close is mostly these four in sequence: post everything, run depreciation, reconcile the sub-ledgers to their reconciliation accounts, then close the period with OB52 so nothing moves afterwards.

Learn FI by following its end-to-end process, its master data, its configuration (in SPRO), and its integration points with finance and neighbouring modules. Hands-on practice in a training system is essential.

Most FI work starts with somebody asking why a number is what it is, so this is the skill to practise. Open the document in FB03 and read three things in order.

First the document type, top left. It tells you where the posting came from: KR for a vendor invoice, RE for an invoice verification from materials management, SA for a manual journal. A document type nobody recognises usually means an interface posted it.

Second the line items, and specifically the posting keys. They say whether each line is a debit or a credit and against what kind of account, which is faster than reading the amounts.

Third the document header and its reference fields, which link back to the originating document. From there you can open the purchase order or the billing document and see what the business actually did.

If the posting looks wrong, the question is almost never "why did FI do this". It is "what did the source document tell FI to do".

• Learning screens, not the end-to-end process.
• Ignoring the finance integration that every logistics module has.
• Skipping master-data setup that the process depends on.

• Treating account determination as an FI problem. It is configured in the logistics module that generates the posting, and FI only sees the result.
• Leaving posting periods open. An open prior period is how a closed month silently changes after the numbers were reported.
• Ignoring number ranges and document types. They are dull until an audit asks why two document types share a range.

FI changed more than most modules. Line items for FI and CO were merged into the Universal Journal, table ACDOCA, so the reconciliation between the two that used to be a period end task no longer exists. Customer and vendor masters became Business Partners under transaction BP, replacing FD01 and FK01. New Asset Accounting is mandatory rather than optional. See SAP CO for what the merge means from the controlling side.

Reading a posting is the start, and configuring a company code from an empty client so those postings land where you intended is the part you do in the course.