Quick Guide: Three steps to determine if postings are being recorded in a timely manner

Up to 52% of postings are not made within the limit of 40 days for timely posting (posting month + 10 days). By reading this Quick Guide, you will be able to find out how to analyze whether postings are being made in a timely manner in SAP. Reduce the risk of incorrect or fraudulent postings in (reopened) posting periods with this method today.

Part II 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

How can you find out if business transactions have not been posted in a timely manner?

But that’s enough of the legalese: you want to know how the situation really looks like in practice at your company when comes to postings being made in a timely manner!

As Goethe’s Faust himself said:

“Well, that’s Philosophy I’ve read,
And Law and Medicine, and I fear
Theology, too, from A to Z;
Hard studies all, that have cost me dear.
And so I sit, poor silly man
No wiser now than when I began…”

So now let’s get down to the practical details!

In SAP, each posting document has different date fields:

• Posting date
• Document date
• Processing date

We are now going to make use of this. As a measure for a timely posting, I therefore recommend that you calculate the difference in days between the posting date and the processing date. If a certain number of days is exceeded, we can consider that we are dealing with a document that has not been recorded in a timely manner. I recommend setting this period at 40 days, because if it takes any longer than that then the posting is made within the (posting) month.

How to get data for an analysis of postings in a timely manner?

If you want to analyze postings in a timely manner in your SAP, you need the necessary data structures and data from your SAP system. zap Audit automatically extracts all the necessary data from your SAP system.

How to perform analytics to determine which postings have been made in a timely manner in SAP?

I have written an ePaper on this subject, where you can read up on how I ran analytics of postings made in a timely manner with raw SQL queries. You can download this paper free of charge by clicking on the following link:

Step 1: Statistics on the creation of postings in a timely manner

First, you need to generate statistics on how many documents were posted after how many days:

Step 2: Analyzing documents that were not posted in a timely manner

Now determine the documents that have not been posted in a timely manner (BELNR field). In what follows, documents with a delay of more than 40 days between the date of the posting (BUDAT field) and the date of processing (CPUDT field) are considered as non-timely documents. The client (MANDT field), the company code (BUKRS field), the fiscal year (GJAHR field), the transaction code (TCODE field), the document type (BLART field), and the user (USNAM field) are also displayed.

Step 3: Use your Professional Judgment when determining postings not made in a timely manner

When interpreting your results, take the following points into consideration:

• Create a list of document types that are operational (for example, invoices and payments). Documents with such document types should in particular be posted very promptly. The explanations for the document types can be determined by using this SQL query:

SELECT * FROM T003T WHERE SPRAS=’E’

• Look out for documents with a retention period of more than one year.

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.