I have been searching for such a rebuild function because the derived flows we use to post automatically tax on interests earned on Money Market fixed term deposits are not correct anymore since the withholding tax conditions have changed as per law. The rebuild function delivered with SAP Treasury was a perfect fit in this particular situation but it could be useful as well in many other situations. In fact it should be used each time an SAP Treasury environment setting (understand a setting that is not directly part of the treasury deal) affecting the deal cash flows is changed (it can be a customizing setting, a market data value, …).

The functionality is offered by transaction TMFM (program RFTMFIMA) which can be found in the application menu Transaction Manager / Money Market / Tools.

Once you have run this transaction, all the relevant cash flows will be reconstructed and corrected in the deal cash flow view and in the TBB1 posting transaction among other things.

So today let’s try to answer this simple question: What is SAP?

SAP is both a company and a products suite. And most people refer to both the company and its main product (the ERP solution) using the SAP acronym.

SAP as a company

SAP is an international company with its headquarters in Germany (in Walldorf) which develops business software that supports most of the operational processes of its customers (mainly large and midsize companies).

It has been funded in 1972 by former IBM engineers and has now around 50.000 employees.

It is today considered as the world’s largest business software company.

SAP as a product

SAP’s flagship product is the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. An ERP is a business software that addresses most of the operational processes of a company covering enterprise functions like Finance, Purchasing, Ordering and Billing, Human Capital management, Project management, Analytics, … through the implementation of software modules. Main SAP ERP modules include:

• SAP FI (Finance)
• SAP CO (Controlling)
• SAP MM (Materials Management)
• SAP SD (Sales and Distribution)
• SAP HR (Human Resources)
• SAP PS (Project System)
• SAP PP (Production Planning)
• SAP CS (Customer Service)

and most of those modules contain sub-modules in order to address specific areas of the functional domains. For example, in SAP FI you will find sub-modules covering General Ledger, Accounts Receivables (i.e. customer accounting), Accounts Payables (i.e. vendor accounting), Asset Accounting, Banking, Treasury, …

Next to ERP, SAP is also offering:

• SAP BW (Business Warehouse) to cover Business Intelligence needs together with SAP Business Objects
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• SRM (Supplier Relationship Management)
• PLM (Product Lifecycle Management>
• SCM (Supply Chain Management)

Most of these products run on a common technical platform currently known as Netweaver which provides common technologies and interfacing techniques to the functional modules ensuring a certain degree of uniformity of those modules.

In the document header, different line item independent fields are defined among which a document status field. This field is used to indicate documents which have a special status with regard to the way they impact (or not) the account balances.

Following FI document statuses exist in ECC6:

•  (SPACE) – Normal document

An empty document status value indicates that the document is a normal document affecting account balances as indicated by the document line items.

• A – Clearing Document

 The FI document status value A is associated to clearing documents. Clearing documents are special documents since they serve the purpose of clearing (other documents) open items by creating a link between those items. They don’t primarily serve the purpose of updating account balances but they affect the status of account items.

• B – Reset clearing document

FI documents with status B are reset clearing documents. Reset clearing documents are FI documents that are used to reset (reverse) clearing documents. Regarding their impact on accounts balances, they have the same behaviour as the clearing documents they reverse.

• D – Recurring entry document

A recurring entry document has the status D. Recurring document entries do not affect account balances as recurring documents  are only templates for the creation of normal documents. Documents created based on recurring document entries have the status of normal documents.

• L - Posting Not in Leading Ledger

Used by the new G/L Accounting framework to indicate documents whose bookings are not made to the leading ledger. As such the leading ledger balances are not affected by those documents.

• M - Sample document

Documents with status M represent sample documents and are similar to recurring document entries (status D) because they represent also templates which do not affect account balances. Account balances are only affected by normal documents that are created based on the sample document.

• S Noted items

A document with status S comprises only noted items which do not affect account balances. Noted items are associated to special G/L indicators and are used to provide information without affecting actual financial figures.

• V Parked document

FI document status V refers to FI documents that are in preparation. Such documents do not affect accounts balances because they are not necessarily complete so they represent drafts of future normal documents.

• W Parked document with change of document ID

Status W is assigned to follow-on documents of parked documents. Such follow-on documents are parked documents themselves and behave like classic parked documents (status V).

• Z Parked document which was deleted

 Document status Z identifies deleted parked documents. Obviously these documents do not affect financial accounts balances.

Finally, note that the document status field is only visible in the document header when its value is not blank (so when the document is not a normal document):

Document status field

SAP techies often start searching for line items in the SAP database on the clearing document number field. This is a workable solution but not suitable for end users. End users should use the payment usage functionality which is directly available in the display document transaction (FB03 or other document display transaction) of clearing documents.

SAP Payment Usage menu

This function triggers the display of a list of the line items cleared by the current clearing document.

Enjoy!

Next enhancements ahead: improvements in the troubleshooting section… Stay tuned.

Using RANGES instead of SELECT-OPTIONS NO-EXTENSION will have no effect on the selection-screen.

The flexibility of the input offered by SELECT-OPTIONS NO-EXTENSION lies between the one offered by PARAMTERS which allows only the input of a single value and the one offered by SELECT-OPTIONS (without the addition NO-EXTENSION) which allows for the input of tables of RANGES.

I start with a very classic one yet very efficient one in order to kill your SAP system: transporting the number ranges. These are maintained generally with SNUM or more specific transactions like FBN1 for accounting document. Although it may be tempting to store these in a transport (you save time since you don’t need to reproduce their creation in the target systems), never do that! Even at creation time since you are never sure that a transport will not be re-imported in case something goes wrong.

However, if you are not happy anymore with your current employer and want a quick way to get out for new challenges, this is a method to be considered seriously!

This function module accepts as import parameters the value (a variable in fact) to be rounded, the number of decimals to take into account for the rounding and a sign mentioning whether a round up (sign = ‘+’), a round down (sign = ‘-’) or a commercial rounding (= to nearest figure) (sign = ‘X’) is to be performed.

It provides the rounded value as output parameter.

As simple as that!

Today I needed my ABAP program to read the 4 last characters of a string. As I have some experience with ABAP, I didn’t expect to find some function like RIGHT accepting as parameter the number of characters to retrieve. That would be far too simple!

So I said to myself that I had 2 obvious alternatives: either counting the length of the string and start reading at the 4th digit before the end of the string which requires the use of offsets in string manipulation (or rotating the string with SHIFT instructions but beware about the technical length of the string!) or inverting the string and reading its 4 starting characters (if the order of the characters is unimportant which is my case).

I settled to implement the string reversal but, guess what, there is no ABAP instruction to reverse a string! This time however, there exists a function module called STRING_REVERSE that performs the job. Ouf!