Posting Keys, Document Types and More in SAP FI. Do I have to teach my User Community to understand German?

Every week that I teach a class, every time I visit an SAP Customer onsite, I have to explain: Why Document type DR? Why Document type KR? And on and on and on (und so weiter!)!

I explain SAP originated in Germany and to the German Business Community, DR. KR, SA makes perfect business sense to them. The same way IN and JE and PO abbreviations make sense to the Business Community in North America.

It is SIMPLE in SAP to change many of the document types the users employ everyday to abbreviations of terms they comprehend! Abbreviations that make sense to you and to your End-User Training. IN equals Invoice, JE (or JV) equals Journal Entry, BD for Bad Debt Write off or even FR for a manual freight invoice. Simple…easy…10 minutes of configuration settings.

This information is not only easier to train the User but it makes the searching for that information so much easier. I usually use the example of Ebay, which has nearly 16,000,000 items for auction and sale each day. If I were to search for pants or hat or truck, I would get thousands of choices across dozens of categories. In order to search effectively on Ebay, you must provide additional information: Men’s pants, Men’s blue plants or finally Men’s blue pants with cuffs size 36. Now I am down to a reasonable selection.

SAP works the same way, except that so many automatic transactions that use Document type SA and DR and DZ and KR as well as posting 40 and 50 that they are rendered useless in using posting key and/or document type for searching!

Yes, there are document types and posting keys you should not change but there are dozens and dozens of opportunities and changes you CAN make in the SAP FI ECC system, to make this a much easier and more profitable conversion for your Enterprise.

And with posting keys, in the automatic transactions: When SAP uses 40 debit and 50 credit, create 41 and 51 or 42 and 52 and put those into your automatic transactions! If everything is a 40 or 50, they are useless to use to audit, reconcile, search your millions or records or even find a simple mistake!

Don’t be afraid! This is why you have a QA system.

Please write with questions!