SAP General Ledger


SAP General Ledger: An Overview and Key Considerations

What Is SAP General Ledger?

SAP General Ledger (G/L) accounts support the recording of all business transactions, updating balances in real time to provide an extensive view of an organization’s business activities. The former version of SAP General Ledger is referred to as Classic General Ledger (Classic G/L). New G/L leverages an extended data structure that helps finance managers reduce the need for periodic closing activities to synchronize Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) modules. This ensures accurate accounting for financial statements.

New SAP General Ledgers support “parallel accounting” functionality, allowing organizations to maintain multiple ledgers for various statutory accounting standards or introduce a special purpose ledger. SAP customers can integrate SAP General Ledger with all operational areas of the company via SAP ERP components to track external and internal transaction postings and settlements. The transactions include business activities originating from profit centers and subsidiary companies, ensuring complete accounting information for generating accurate internal and external financial reporting across the organization.

Key SAP General Ledger functions for entering and evaluating posting data:

  • Group-level or company-level accounting capacity
  • Subledger items automatically posted to the appropriate general ledger accounts (reconciliation)
  • Tight integration of parallel general ledgers and cost accounting areas, allowing for real-time synchronization
  • Multiple balance sheet views and account displays of financial information to provide real-time evaluation of and reporting on current posting data.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

SAP General Ledger: An Overview and Key Considerations

What Is SAP General Ledger?

SAP General Ledger (G/L) accounts support the recording of all business transactions, updating balances in real time to provide an extensive view of an organization’s business activities. The former version of SAP General Ledger is referred to as Classic General Ledger (Classic G/L). New G/L leverages an extended data structure that helps finance managers reduce the need for periodic closing activities to synchronize Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) modules. This ensures accurate accounting for financial statements.

New SAP General Ledgers support “parallel accounting” functionality, allowing organizations to maintain multiple ledgers for various statutory accounting standards or introduce a special purpose ledger. SAP customers can integrate SAP General Ledger with all operational areas of the company via SAP ERP components to track external and internal transaction postings and settlements. The transactions include business activities originating from profit centers and subsidiary companies, ensuring complete accounting information for generating accurate internal and external financial reporting across the organization.

Key SAP General Ledger functions for entering and evaluating posting data:

  • Group-level or company-level accounting capacity
  • Subledger items automatically posted to the appropriate general ledger accounts (reconciliation)
  • Tight integration of parallel general ledgers and cost accounting areas, allowing for real-time synchronization
  • Multiple balance sheet views and account displays of financial information to provide real-time evaluation of and reporting on current posting data.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

Leverage New G/L functionality for enhanced transaction drilldown capability and auditability. Online document splitting is standard functionality in New G/L, allowing finance managers to review all business transactions across various levels. Those levels include account information, journals, transactions figures and totals, and balance sheet profit/loss evaluations, to audit individual transactions in real time, supported by streamlined access to original documents, line items, and monthly debits/credits.

Evaluate core reporting requirements before establishing new G/L accounts. Information provided for statutory and management accounting tasks is ultimately governed by G/L master data. Business stakeholders or subject matter experts should confirm business processes and master data dependencies properly align with how GL accounts and sub-accounts are defined, to support automation opportunities and integration initiatives.

Consider migration to SAP S/4HANA as an opportunity to optimize G/L accounts. SAP provides pre-built functionality for standard chart of accounts (YCOA) as best practices for organizations, using existing chart of accounts. Organizations can leverage additional granularity from 350+ fields and dimensions, to achieve business process efficiencies in the areas of account maintenance and financial closing activities. Furthermore, finance managers can benefit from new G/L and Universal Journal functionality to update existing chart of accounts to better align with legal entities and business process needs across industry, operating regions, company size, corporate structure, etc.

12 results

  1. Working With SAP Material Ledger and SAP Group Reporting in HANA 2022

    Published: 08/September/2023

    Reading time: 15 mins

    Intercompany transactions require significant attention and have always been a critical part of the financial analysis world in SAP. Certainly, this process is very complex, and it will require significant resources with different levels of expertise as operational reporting and business requirements become more detailed. In this article, SAPinsider expert Dr. March Sisfontes-Monge will highlight…

  2. Core Accounting

    Core Accounting is a Growing Priority for SAPinsiders

    Published: 02/May/2022

    Reading time: 3 mins

    In our SAP S/4HANA Finance and Central Finance: State of the Market 2022 benchmark report, we saw the share of SAPinsider organizations planning to invest resources into core accounting processes increase to 28% (from 18% in 2021). These organizations view this finance and accounting strategy as an opportunity to address growing organizational complexity, the top…

  3. Mitresh Kundalia image

    Building Consistent Global GL Processes

    Published: 30/July/2021

    Reading time: 3 mins

    When SAP first launched SAP S/4HANA, the latest iteration of its core ERP, the mantra was “Run Simple.” That marketing jargon was born out of a motivating factor for many finance professionals — to create a simplified general ledger (GL) concept, moving from many ledgers down to one for the entire business. Regardless of whether…

  4. Best practices for managing the standardization of chart of accounts in a live SAP system

    Learn about your options to tame a chart of accounts that has grown to be unmanageable and unwieldy, and dive into key considerations for a successful and seamless chart of accounts standardization initiative using SLO-type conversion methodology. By attending, you learn: - Learn about the structural transformations you should do in your system, prior to…

  5. How SAP S/4HANA Drives General Ledger Account Optimization

    Published: 30/March/2021

    Reading time: 2 mins

    The universal journal is a single table incorporating all financial information and select logistics and operational information. While many finance controllers, system implementors, and accountants acknowledge the reporting benefits of having information stored in a single table, the recent combination of the Finance and Controlling tables into the universal journal in the latest version of…

  6. SAP General Ledger

    Technical Guide: Migrating SAP General Ledger Data for SAP S/4HANA

    Published: 31/July/2020

    Reading time: 11 mins

    SAP has simplified its accounting design by introducing the Universal Journal, resulting in significant change to the pillar of GL accounting—GL account master data. Whether a customer is pursuing a greenfield implementation or a technical migration to SAP S/4HANA, maintenance or migration to GL accounts using the new technical framework is a basic yet important…

  7. Inside the Value of the SAP S/4HANA for Financial Products Subledger Solution: Insurance Provider Swiss Re Teams with SAP to Take SAP S/4HANA for Financial Products Subledger to the Next Level

    Published: 17/February/2020

    Reading time: 6 mins

    by Esther Shein, Contributing Writer, SAPinsider  Digital transformation is paving the way for insurance companies to modernize their processes and Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest wholesale insurance and reinsurance providers, has partnered with SAP to develop and test its SAP S/4HANA for Financial Products Subledger (FPSL).  This innovative solution provides concurrent accounting across multiple accounting bases…

  8. A Comprehensive Subledger Solution For Finance Transformation

    Published: 21/August/2019

    Reading time: 1 min

    Simplify accounting for financial products with SAP.

  9. Regain Control of SAP Journal Entries

    Published: 01/April/2019

    Reading time: 2 mins

    Many companies struggle with a variety of problems regarding their journal entry processes — such as approval procedures, accounting requirements, and complex workflows — that are unique to their business. A good number of these are SAP customers that continue to collect, route, and manage their journal entries with manual processes, emails, and spreadsheets, which…

  10. Best Practices to Manage a Smooth Chart-of-Accounts Conversion in an SAP Environment

    Published: 27/December/2017

    Reading time: 10 mins

    You are a massive global organization with a complex system landscape and want to embark upon an SAP General Ledger (formerly known as new G/L) or SAP S/4HANA journey. These best practices help you clean up and standardize key processes or data to prepare for a chart-of-accounts (COA) conversion. Key Concept Once the SAP system...…