Part VIII of the series: “Digitization of auditing SAP Fixed Asset and Inventory Processes”
This blog post is covering the most important SAP tables in the area of fixed assets and inventories, which are of interest to the auditor for analytic purposes.
1. Auditing SAP processes in fixed asset and inventory
2. Master Data audit of SAP fixed assets
3. How to audit fixed assets procurement in SAP
4. SAP data analytics for fixed asset depreciation
5. Auditing fixed asset retirement in SAP
6. Process analytics for SAP current asset transactions
7. Segregation of Duties in SAP asset management
8. Fixed asset data structure in SAP
9. Professional Judgement in auditing SAP fixed assets
Important SAP tables in fixed asset and inventory
The most important SAP tables for auditing SAP fixed assets and inventories for the auditor are:
- ANKA: Asset Classes (General Data)
- ANKT: Asset Classes (Description)
- ANLH: Main Asset Number
- ANLA: Asset Master Record Segment
- ANLB: Abschreibungsparameter
- ANLC: Asset Value Fields
- ANLP: Asset Periodic Values
- MARA: General Material Data
- MBEW: Material Valuation
- MKPF: Header Material Document
- MSEG: Document Segment Material
Relations to accounting
Certain documents in the accounting system refer to documents on fixed assets. These are business transactions in connection with fixed assets: access to a fixed asset, disposal of a fixed asset or depreciation. In the accounting document (table BSEG), you can see a reference to a fixed asset in the data fields ANLN1 (main asset number) and ANLN2 (asset subnumber).
Data mining your SAP system
Mining data from your SAP system is not always easy. There are various tools on the market which allow for data extraction from SAP systems. Usually for this purpose, an ABAP program needs to be installed. However, this is at the same time a “show-stopper” in many companies, as transports into a SAP system require a Change Management process. They often take a long time and have to go through a series of authorization steps.
Another possibility is to manually download single tables from the SAP system. To do so, transactions, like SE16 may be applied. However, this requires a lot of manual handling and is rather inconvenient.
Via Remote Function Call (RFC), SAP data tables can be extracted from a SAP system. For doing this, a user account with corresponding user rights needs to call up RFC-components. As a result an ABAP program is not required. On the one hand RFC is comparatively old and sometimes slow. On the other hand it is established and available in every SAP system. By using RFC, the data extraction can cleverly be optimized. In addition it makes SAP data extraction for analytic purposes easy and convenient. You can try this approach being included in zap Audit free of charge. Want to know more? Just schedule an appointment here.
