In my last blog post, I presented a way of analyzing whether postings are being recorded in a timely manner depending on the month of processing. Now we are going to take this one step further and conduct an audit to check whether there are certain business transactions / document types that are being left unprocessed more often than others.
Part IV of the series: “Recording of postings in a timely manner”
1. Don’t put it off until tomorrow… recording of postings in a timely manner
2. Quick Guide: Three steps to determine if postings are being recorded in a timely manner
3. Analysis of the continuous recording of postings over time
4. How you can notice which business transactions are being left undealt with for a longer period of time
While in my last post I presented a way of conducting such an analysis using an export from zap Audit, this post focuses on using the SAP GUI to audit the document types. In what follows, we will show you not only the relevant SAP transactions you need to perform, but also a potential way of conducting a more in-depth analysis of document types simply by using the SAP GUI and Microsoft Excel.
How can I analyze whether postings are being recorded in a timely manner in SAP?
At first, we need some data to analyze to determine whether postings are being recorded in a timely manner. I know it may sound a bit unusual, but analyzes of this kind are in fact pretty easy to perform within SAP. Simply by using everyone’s all-time favorite SAP transaction “General Table Display” SE16N or SE16, you can get the data you need directly. For analyzes of this kind, we will only need the Company Code, Document Number, Fiscal Year, Document Type, Posting Date and Entered on date, all of which can be found in the “BKPF” table. So all we need to do is enter BKPF in the “Table” field and press “Return”. We will then obtain all the field names for the BKPF table. To avoid getting into any heated discussions with your data security officer, I would definitely recommend leaving out the field name “USNAM”, as it contains the name of the user responsible for the posting of a document, and only selecting the fields as shown with a checkmark below.
But this is where we start to come up against the limitations of SAP. With a Maximum no. of hits of 500, we will only receive 500 documents, which may be no more than the tip of the iceberg of the few million or so you might have in your SAP system.
This means that SAP will only show 500 documents in the upcoming report, but not all of the 500 documents shown will necessarily be ones that have been posted in a timely manner. You could even be really unlucky and there might not even be one single document with recording of postings in a timely manner. The only option you have is to increase the Maximum no. of hits, but bear in mind that generating this kind of report could take quite some time.
Conclusion: A complete analysis of the differences between posting and processing date is not possible simply by using SAP and Excel.
Why is zap Audit the solution?
Because it has been specially developed to perform a complete and extensive analysis of your SAP data. It does not perform an analysis on a random basis, but analyzes your full SAP data set. And that’s just one reason why you should start digitizing your audit with zap Audit today! You can contact us here to start your project.
What’s wrong with an analysis on a random basis?
Of course, I’m not going to end this blog post here. Sometimes it might not be pleasant, but it has to be done, so you just grin and bear it. If you think you have the necessary patience, you can of course always increase the Maximum no. of hits to, say, 200,000 to get a more complete picture. As I have already said, this is where you may have to be a little bit patient, but you can probably put up with waiting for a few minutes or so, right? Just try some values on your own. Perhaps your SAP system is faster than mine and will provide more results in a shorter time?
By clicking on the clock in SAP (Online “F8”), you will receive a report of 200,000 documents with the relevant data you need for further investigation. Based on this report, we can proceed with our analysis on a random basis. For the following steps, we need to export this list as a spreadsheet, so we can use it in Excel.
Step 1 in Excel: Marking documents with a difference between posting and entry date
The exported lists need to be delimited, so we can analyze the document types with a difference of more than one accounting month (30 days) plus the 10 days required by the German accounting principles on proper book-keeping (GoBD). So, we need to determine if a document has a difference of more than 40 days or not. To do this, we add another column to the Excel spreadsheet named: “Difference > 40 days” and use the following formula in all cells in the column:
=IF(DAYS(H2;F2)>40; “YES”; “NO”)
Every new cell will contain “YES” if the difference is more than 40 days, or “NO” if the difference is less than 40 days.
Step 2: Creating a PivotTable
After we have added the column with the difference, we can once more use a PivotTable to illustrate the differences in a nice chart. Simply select the whole spreadsheet, by pressing CTRL + A, for example, and select “Insert – PivotTable” from the menu in Excel. Remember to insert the chart in a new spreadsheet. Next we choose the difference as columns, the document types as rows and document number as values. In this way, you will obtain a rapid overview of all the document types being posted with a difference between posting and entry date of greater than or less than the required period. Your results should look something like this:
If you find some abbreviations of document types that you are not familiar with, you can easily look them up in SAP, or in the “T003T” table, by using the “SE16N” transaction, for example.
Step 3: Professional Judgment
Now it’s time for you to exercise your professional judgment. How do you interpret the resulting data and what kind of negative effects could the circumstances revealed by the analysis have for your company? We’d like to hear from you so share your thoughts by commenting on this post below.
In zap Audit, we have integrated a much more efficient process for the analysis of postings in a timely manner, so you don’t need to look up document types, processing and posting dates or examine any data on your own. In addition, we have added business intelligence methods and are constantly working to improve the algorithms used. That’s why you should automate everything that can be automated with zap Audit, and only audit, what needs to be audited.
What are your experiences of postings being made in a timely manner? Share your thoughts with us here.
