Purpose:
Purpose of this document is to explain the process of collecting the data from external entities for the purpose of group reporting. This document explains the Process of Upload of data from Non-SAP entities.
This blog is intended for Functional Consultants, Business users, and Group Accountants.
What will you learn from this Blog
From this blog, readers will understand
- Overview of Group Reporting
- Heterogeneous landscape and its impact on GR
- Various options available for data collection
- Flexible Upload of Financial data
- File format and where to find them
- Usage
- Final Note
Overview of GR
Preparation of Consolidated Financial Statements is mandatory for Statutory compliance, such as IFRS, US GAAP etc. Group Reporting is the new embedded solution in SAP S/4HANA providing statutory as well as managerial financial consolidation capabilities. It is available both for On premise and cloud customers.
Customer landscape might be in different. Not all the entities that form part of consolidation needs to be in SAP. In situations like heterogeneous landscape, getting the required data for consolidation is a troublesome.
With the latest innovation in SAP S/4 Hana with less disruptions, this is made it possible to get the data from other systems. Classic example for such innovation is Central finance. Using the Central finance option, customers would be able to get the data from Non-SAP system to central finance system, If Group reporting is implemented on top of central finance system, then the required data for consolidation can be extracted from Central Finance system itself.
Below diagram explain the high-level architecture of Integrated and Non Integrated Units.
It is not necessary that every customer who wants to implement Group Reporting, should implement Central finance. SAP has understood this situation well and provided other features such as Group reporting Data collection app and Flexible upload of Reported Finance data for collection of data from Non-integrated units.
In this blog, we will discuss about the option of Flexible upload of Reported Financial data.
For more details on the group reporting, please refer to the below
https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/10/demystifying-s4hana-group-reporting/
Flexible upload of Reported Financial data
As by now we understood that Flexible upload of Reported Financial data is one of the option of loading the data from Non S/4 Entities in to Group Reporting for Consolidation Purposes. As and when the data is loaded using this option, data will be directly loaded to Group reporting table i.e. ACDOCU table. You can find in the ACDOCU table, if the item is coming from upload or not.
File format
SAP has Fixed the file format required for collecting the data and loading in to Group reporting. One can download the sample format from the below OSS notes
- For On premise customers – 2659672
- For cloud customers – 2659656
There are two methods of upload file format that Group Reporting supports. SRD1 and SRD2.
In this Blog, we will discuss on the file format, and upload process for SRD2
Sample file format looks like as below
File format has to be csv file with semi colon as a separator. The moment you look at sample file, few things will catch our attention such as P, D and 2.
File is divided in to three parts, P stands for the parameters section, D stands for the heeder row section and 2 stands for the data value in the row. Keep in mind that parameter is not uploaded in to the system.
Significance of Parameters section
Parameters plays very important role in the flexible upload of financial data. Each filed has its importance. Business users would be play around with the fields to upload data in different ways. Let’s look at the few important fields
If Periodical is X – If you enter X the data of the file is interpreted as period data,
If Periodical is BLANK – If you leave it Blank, it signifies that the data in the file is cumulative data. system subtracts the cumulative data from the previous year, calculates the periodic data, and then stores the cumulative data to the specified period.
If you are loading the historical data, instead of loading period wise, it is good to use the option of cumulative data. Also in cases where business found out that the data loaded in previous period is incorrect, corrections can be done with cumulative data load.
Another important parameter is Update mode
There are two possible options for this update mode.
Update Mode 1 – Delete – all FS items, all sub assignments: The deletion replaces any existing data that was uploaded using the same combination of version, ledger, period, consolidation unit, and document type. The system does not delete any data physically in the system. Instead, it calculates a delta between the new data and any data uploaded previously and then creates new records for the delta data.
Update Method 2 – to overwrite: Only the uploaded records are written. Any existing records that share the same item and all of the same sub assignments are overwritten.
Other significant fields can be explored by individual consultants based on the requirements.
Usage
Once the business user has prepared the flexible upload in the required format, next step is to load the data in to system for consolidation purposes.
Upload files can be loaded in to system either by any other below process
Data Monitor App – manual collection of data task
Flexible upload of financial data App
Data Monitor app
Ensure that the posting period is open, and task is unlocked.
When you execute the particular task, it will direct to flexible upload of reported financial data app.
Select the Upload method SRD2, if any changes needs to be done for SRD2 upload method, click on the push button available and change it as per the requirement.
Specify the parameters such as Upload method, file format, and file name if it is in presentation server, if it is in application server, specify the application server path.
You have an option to run the upload either in test run, or update run.
Final Note
Flexible upload is one of the way of getting financial data of Non integrated units in Group Reporting. It is required to pay special attention to the Parameters, Periodical and Update mode. Combination of this two would be little confusing and require special attention.
More details can be found in below
Original Article:
https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/03/flexible-upload-of-data-in-group-reporting/