Parallel Ledgers

This feature is available in New G/L Accounting in SAP Financials.

In General Ledger Accounting, you can perform parallel accounting by running several parallel ledgers (general ledgers) for different accounting principles. During posting, you can post data to all ledgers, to a specified or to a single ledger

This feature helps to maintain different sets of ledgers in one Company Code. This feature becomes very useful when financial reporting is to be done with different accounting standards. 

SAP recommends that you implement this parallel ledger approach if the number of general ledger accounts would be unmanageable for the scenario using additional accounts.

Advantages

• You manage a separate ledger for each accounting principle.
  
• You can use standard reporting for the leading ledger and all other parallel ledgers.
  
• With this solution scenario, you can portray different fiscal year variants.
  
• The number of general ledger accounts is manageable.
  

Disadvantages

• The use of parallel ledgers increases the volume of data.
  

Before we proceed further on the parallel ledger accounting, we must first understand certain terminologies involved in parallel accounting:

Leading Ledger
The leading ledger is based on the same accounting principle as that of the consolidated financial statement. It is integrated with all subsidiary ledgers and is updated in all company codes. You must designate exactly one ledger as the leading ledger.

Features 

• This is the basic ledger which gets posted on posting of any document. 
  
• This is the main ledger which The leading ledger is  automatically assigned to every company code in the system. 
  
• In each company code, the leading ledger receives exactly the same settings that apply to that company code: the currencies, the fiscal year variant, and the variant of the posting periods
  
• Second and Third parallel currencies can be assigned to Leading Ledger
  

Non Leading Ledger
The non-leading ledgers are parallel ledgers to the leading ledger. They can be based, for example, on local accounting principles such as IFRS. You have to activate a non-leading ledger for each company code.

Features

• These are additional or parallel ledgers to be drawn according to other accounting principle
  
• Can have different fiscal year variants and different posting period variants per company code to the leading ledger of this company code.
  
• The second and third currency of the non-leading ledger must be a currency that is managed as second or third currency in the respective company code.
  
• However, you do not have to have a second and third currency in the parallel ledgers; these are optional. Alternative currencies are not possible.
  

Implementation Consideration

Defining Ledgers

IMG Path: Financial Accounting (New) > Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) > Ledgers > Ledger > Define Ledgers for General Ledger Accounting

Both the ledgers i.e. Leading and Non-Leading are defined here. SAP comes with Leading Ledger "0L", please do not change any configuration of the same.

In order to add a new Non-Leading ledger, click on New Entries and system will prompt you to enter following data:

Ledger:            Enter the Non-Leading Ledger code here
Name:             Enter the description of the Non-Leading Ledger
Totals Table: Enter FAGLFLEXT
Leading:         Do not select this option, SAP does not allow more than one Leading Ledger


Additional Currencies
This is another feature provided by SAP, this feature allows us to draw the financial in multiple currencies at the same time without any additional postings. This feature assigns currencies only to Leading Ledger.

IMG Path: Financial Accounting (New) > Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) > Ledgers > Ledger > Define Currencies of Leading Ledger

Here we can assign upto three currencies. One of them is company code currency. Other two currencies can be freely assigned as per requirement.

Given below is the list of available 

10 Company code currency
30 Group currency
40 Hard currency
50 Index-based currency
60 Global company currency

We can use above currencies (use except Company Code Currency which is assigned as first currency by default). Every currency has its use in various situations.

Assign Parallel Ledger
The next step in Parallel Ledger is to assign the Parallel Ledger created to the Company Codes

IMG Path: Financial Accounting (New) > Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) > Ledgers > Ledger > Define and Activate Non-Leading Ledgers

In this step, system asks you to enter the Parallel Ledger. Then assign the same to the relevant Company Codes.

This step involves following fields:

CoCd: Enter the Company Code
C1 : System by default shows the same as Company Code currency
C2 : Enter the Second Currency that we want for the parallel ledger
C3 :  Enter the Third Currency that we want for the parallel ledger
FV : Enter the Fiscal Year Variant that we want to follow.
Var: Posting Period Variant, if left blank, Company Code's PPV becomes applicable.

Note: In case of Fiscal Year Variant other than the Company Code, then a separate number range is to be maintained for General Ledger View of the document.

Assign Scenarios and Customer Fields
Here we maintain following:

IMG Path: Financial Accounting (New) > Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) > Ledgers > Ledger > Assign Scenarios and Customer Fields to Ledgers

Scenarios
This determines what fields in a ledger are updated when it receives posting from other application components.

Custom Fields
You can add custom fields (that you have already defined) to the ledger.

Versions
This enables you to make general version settings for the ledger that depend on the fiscal year. In the versions, you specify whether actual data is recorded, whether manual planning is allowed, and whether planning integration with Controlling is activated.

Reference Material
Currencies