One of the period-end tasks within every company is the reconciliation between affiliated companies. This is often a difficult and time-consuming activity.

For company codes that have their accounts receivable and accounts payable administration in the same client, SAP offers a transaction that can do automatic document reconciliation.

Transaction F.2E is available from Release 4.6A and is not well documented. I will give a brief description of the automatic reconciliation transaction between affiliated companies and describe its prerequisites.

Prerequisites

Before you can use the transaction F.2E, you have to meet some prerequisites. First, you have to assign the company codes that you want to reconcile to a company. Normally this is a one-to-one relationship, although this is not a definitive requirement. Define companies with transaction OX15, or follow IMG menu path Enterprise structure>Definition>Financial accounting> Define company (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Define the company

Allocate companies to company codes with transaction OX16, or follow IMG menu path Enterprise structure>Allocation>Financial accounting>Assign company code to company (Figure 2). You also can assign a company code to a company using transaction OBY6.

Figure 2

Assign the company code to a company

Next, set up the customer and vendor master data. For each company code, you have to define at least one intercompany customer and one intercompany vendor, although you may define more than one if you want. The intercompany customers and vendors must be assigned to a trading partner. The trading partner indicates to which company the customer or vendor belongs.

For example, the customer representing Company X Branch must be assigned to the company 419476 (Figure 3). The trading partner number is the same number as the company you created for the company code that your customer and vendor represent.

Figure 3

Assign customers to a trading partner

The trading partner is located on the Control data tab of general customer data. Maintain the trading partner data using transactions FD01/FD02 (create/modify customer master data for finance) or XD01/XD02 (create/modify customer master data for finance and sales).

Reconcile the Documents

During reconciliation, the R/3 system must be able to identify related documents. The system uses the reference field (technical name BKPF-XBLNR) in the document header to identify the related documents (Figure 4). It is possible to change the method of matching via customizing transaction F.2I. (Describing the use of F.21 is beyond the scope of this article.)

Figure 4

Figure 4 Reference field in financial document

On the sales invoice, the reference field must be populated with the sales invoice number. You have two ways to ensure the sales invoice number is included in the reference field. One is to modify the standard user exit in the interface between SD and FI EXIT_SAPLV60B_001 (program ZXVVFU01). The other uses the copy control settings for billing documents. You find these settings in the IMG menu path Sales and Distribution>Billing>Maintain Copying Control for Billing Documents (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Copy control settings for billing documents

Figure 6 shows the settings of the copying controls from delivery document to billing document.

Figure 6

Copying control: delivery document to billing document

If you leave the setting for Reference number blank, then the default value for the reference field in the finance document is the sales invoice number. However, if a reference number is entered in the sales order, then this reference number is copied into the financial document instead of the invoice number. To ensure that the invoice number is put in the Reference number field, enter an E for the allocation number. You must check these copy control settings for all intercompany invoice types.

On the purchase order side, you have to make sure that the sales invoice number is entered in the reference field of the purchase order. In many companies this is a manual procedure. When using the manual procedure, enter the sales invoice number in the reference field of the purchasing invoicing. Other companies use automatic creation of intercompany purchasing invoices based on the intercompany sales invoices using the IDoc functionality.

Reconcile Affiliated Companies

After completing the configuration and the master data maintenance, you can use transaction F.2E for automatic reconciliation of affiliated companies. You can find this transaction in two places: Accounting>Financial Accounting>Accounts Receivable>Periodic Processing>Closing>Check/count>Reconcile affiliated companies or Accounting>Financial Accounting>Accounts Payable>Periodic Processing>Closing>Check/count>Reconcile affiliated companies. The transaction is also part of the Consolidation module (EC-CS) as part of the intercompany elimination.

Starting transaction F.2E takes you immediately to the selection screen shown in Figure 7. On this screen you enter the company codes that you want to reconcile and the partner company codes that you want to reconcile with. Also enter a key date and a currency.

Figure 7

Selection screen for F.2E

On the Further selections tab under Technical settings, you can set the Conversion for reference number indicator (Figure 8). Set the flag for this indicator to eliminate leading zeroes in the reference number. This is relevant if you use document numbers with fewer than 10 digits.

Figure 8

Indicator to suppress leading zeroes

Initially you only see the company codes for which you run the program, not the partner company codes. In the example in Figure 9, you would only see company code NL60. You can add detailed information by clicking on the triangle () in front of a line. The detailed lines appear and the triangle is displayed as (). You can also expand or collapse the tree by using the () buttons. The buttons are shown on the left of the screen in Figure 9.

Figure 9

Complete overview of F.2E

The screen expands with detail lines, but the right of the screen still has no information. To see all the individual items, double-click on one of the lines. Figure 9 shows the complete overview after double-clicking on the line Receivables.

At the top of the screen, you can limit or expand what you want to be displayed by clicking one of the three buttons: (). Red indicates documents in error, meaning that not all documents could be assigned. Yellow shows warnings (e.g., the amount in the company code equals the amount in the partner company code, but not all documents could be assigned). Green designates that there are no errors or warnings, so all documents could be assigned.

The overview screen only shows documents that cannot be assigned. Figure 9 shows the unassigned receivables in company code NL60, the unassigned payables in company code GB60, and the unassigned receivables in NL60 that don’t have a unique reference number (at the bottom of the screen).

Assign Documents

On the overview screen shown in Figure 9, assign documents to each other. As you assign them, the documents disappear from the overview. Select the documents that you want to assign via the menu path Documents>Assign documents>Maintain assignment (Figure 10). The maintenance of the assignment means that you can change the reference field in the financial document header.

Figure 10

Manually maintain assignment

Tips for Using F.2E

• You can define your own layout for each part of the screen. Define the layouts that are the most convenient for you as the default. Follow the menu path Settings>Personal settings.
• You can use the search button in each of the three parts of the screen: receivables, payables, and document group.
• You can send messages to other users. Use transaction F.2K to define templates to notify other users during document reconciliation. Follow the menu path Message>Generate to send the messages.

Kees van Westerop

Kees van Westerop has been working as an SAP consultant for more than 25 years. He has an MBA degree in mathematics and a degree in finance. Kees has been concentrating on the financial modules, especially in general ledger accounting, cost center accounting, and consolidation. He also has a great deal of experience with rollouts of kernel systems and integrating finance and logistics.

You may contact the author at keesvanwesterop@hotmail.com.

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