SAP ERP Financials and FICO Handbook

230 CHAPTER 6 FICO QUICK TOUR
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Company code: The company code is an independent account
unit for which you maintain books of account for external
reporting.
In SAP R/3 or mySAP Financial, you follow the variant principle
to simplify the configuration, The variant principle is a threestep
process: (1) Create the variant, (2) populate the variant with
data, and (3) assign the variant to business objects.
6.2 FI GENERAL
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The term “accounting” is used to capture day-to-day business
transactions for various purposes. You can broadly classify
accounting information users as (1) external users, i.e., Internal
Accounting Standards (IAS), International Financial Reporting
Standards (IFRS), stockholders, and other legal authorities and
(2) internal users, i.e., the management of a company.
The Financial Information (FI) modules take care of external
reporting by providing information in the form of a balance
sheet and P&L account.
The Controlling (CO) module takes care of management’s
reporting requirements. It offers a variety of reporting tools
that handle different reporting requirements for the effective
management of an entity. FI is the main source of data for CO;
however, sometimes the CO module generates FI postings, such
as reconciliation posting initiated by the reconciliation ledger.
To post business transactions to a period, you must define or
maintain an accounting year or financial year. In SAP R/3 or in
mySAP Financial, this is called the fiscal year. There are two
types of fiscal year: (1) year independent and (2) year dependent.
A year-dependent fiscal year is valid for a particular year that
you are defining (see Figure 6.1). If you are using a yeardependent
fiscal year, then each and every year you have to
maintain the definition of the fiscal year. For an example of a
shortened fiscal year, is year dependent fiscal year.