Posting periods

Posting periods are interval of periods that you can use to post accounting documents. All periods are defined and generated using a fiscal year variant and when you manage posting periods you just specify which periods are open for posting in general, but you can also define them depending on subledgers, G/L accounts and user groups.

Prior defining which are the posting periods for a company code, if the company use a new fiscal year variant, you have to perform the steps related to the fiscal year variant.

Then you can continue with the steps to define the posting periods:

• Define a variant for open posting periods.
• Assign the variant to the company code.
• Define which periods are open/close for posting.

If the behaviour of closing and openning periods is the same in various company codes, you could assign the same variant to all those companies. As a result, when you close or open a period it will apply to all the companies involved.

As we’ve seen in the previous video (step 3), in order to define the posting periods you have to specify which time intervals are open and under which conditions.

Usually, the current period is the period open for posting and all others are closed. When the period changes, the new period has to be open so that documents can be posted in that period. This means you have to set the new current period in the “To Per.” field of the time intervals you have defined. Once closing activities have been performed for the previous period, you should set the new current period in the “From Per.” field, to prevent it can’t be posted any other documents in the previous period by mistake.

The posting period variants have one or more rows with different conditions. The first one is the account type, the second is a range of admited account numbers.

When a document is going to be posted, each account is checked against the corresponding posting variant to get the correct row whose conditions match the account and account type. Once the applicable row has been determined, its time intervals are checked against the posting period of the document.

There are 7 account types that can be used, and the most common are D (customers), K (vendors), M (materials), A (assets), or + (any other type not specified). If you don’t need a different behaviour between account types, just use the “+” account type.

Check the following slides for a better understanding:

There are 3 period intervals that you can use for different purposes.

The first period interval is used to specify the open periods that can be posted by a group of authorized users. Those users must have the authorization object F_BKPF_BUP with the value specified in the “Authorization Group” field.

This interval is recommended to allow postings only to special users during closing activities of the previous period. You can use it specially for special periods when closing the fiscal year.

The second period interval is used to specify the open periods that can be posted by any user in regular periods. If the company don’t have any special period, and don’t have any special users either, it’s enough to maintain this interval only.

The period interval 3 is used in case you need different periods for postings from CO to FI. If not filled, intervals 1 & 2 are used instead.

The following objects have been mentioned in this topic and you should consider going over them:

• Accounting documents
• Fiscal year variant.
• Subledgers.
• G/L accounts.
• Company code.

These are some transactions codes to access some of the points related to this topic:

The table where you can find the posting periods is T001B.

If you want to check whether a period is open or not use the function FI_PERIOD_CHECK.