fiscal year variant explanation in SAP

The fiscal year represents the accounting year or annual accounting period. A fiscal year variant defines your company's accounting posting periods. A proper business accounting transaction normally covers a 12-month period. The normal rule is that business transactions are assigned to the period during which the transaction took place. The fiscal year variant is customized to match your company's fiscal year, which does not necessarily have to be the same as the normal calendar year (that is, January to December). SAP ERP is dynamic enough to fit into your company's calendar or fiscal year.

Fiscal year variant is defined with posting periods. Posting periods are technical terms used to refer to months. In SAP ERP, the fiscal year is made up of 12 posting periods. Besides the normal 12 posting periods, you can define up to four special posting periods, which are used for posting year-end adjustments to closed periods. For example, if the normal fiscal period is closed, adjustments can still be posted in one of the four special periods.

With year independent, the accounting periods of a company remain the same each year (that is, the financial reporting year is constant). For example, an enterprise fiscal year is January to December of each year. There are two types of year independent fiscal year variants in SAP:

• Calendar year: The posting period is the same as the calendar year, usually 12 months. The posting period runs 12 months each year. For example, the U.S. financial year starts in January and ends in December.
• Non-calendar year: These are time periods that start and end any month of the year, except January and December. In the UK, for example, the fiscal year starts in April and ends in March. Since the non-calendar year did not start in January 1^st, you use indicator -1 or + 1 for the period of the year that belongs to the former or latter fiscal year.

Note

February is counted as 29 days irrespective of actual number of days in February in order for the system to take leap year into consideration. The SAP system comes with standard fiscal year variants. We recommend that you use the standard fiscal year variants supplied by the system. As examples, the fiscal year variant for the United States (January to December) is K4 and the fiscal year variant for the UK (April to March) is V3.

You can copy and modify the standard fiscal year variant.

If you decide to define your own fiscal year variant, use a two-digit alphanumeric identifier of your choice as your variant and maintain your fiscal year variant as appropriate.