SAP Financial Accounting (FI) - SAP ERP Tutorial

- [Instructor] SAP ERP is broken up into different modules that interact with each other. Let's dive into the SAP financial accounting module, often referred to as SAP FI. The SAP FI module is responsible for tracking and reporting on financial data across an organization. It contains nearly every financial business process a company may have. Because it is so versatile, the SAP FI module is one of the most widely implemented by companies using SAP. In SAP FI, all our transactions start and end with a general ledger or G/L. The G/L includes all of a company's financial transaction data and a chart of accounts where all of the accounts are listed in the system. Transactions are recorded in sub modules that can be reconciled with the general ledger data in real time. There are four primary sub modules of SAP FI in the general ledger. They are accounts payable, accounts receivable, asset accounting and bank management. Accounts payable, or AP is the sub module that houses supplier related data. This is where we can look at a business partner record for a supplier and see information like current payment terms. Capabilities of accounts payable include invoice and credit memo posting, invoice payments, and automatic payments programs. It's also where supplier reporting happens. Let's look at an example. In our test system, we're looking at a document of an outgoing payment for 15,000 U.S. dollars. We can see our vendor is called ABC Insurance. We can also see the general ledger accounts. Next we have accounts receivable or AR. This is where we deal with business partner records to manage our customer data. Transactions and accounts receivable include invoice creation, invoice posting and payments, and it's where we run any customer base reporting we may need. Again, let's jump into our system and this time we'll look at an accounts receivable document. Here we're looking at an invoice that was created from a sales order in the system. We can see that this invoice is for a payer named Midwest Supply Company. The net value of this invoice is 480 U.S. dollars. And in the line item area below, we have the specific line-by-line details for this invoice. We can see it that this invoice was for consulting services executive, and the customer was billed for four hours. The SAP FI sub module that deals with the company's fixed assets is called asset accounting. Examples of fixed assets are things like owned warehouses, land, vehicles, and computer hardware or software. Functions of asset accounting include recording acquisition, depreciation, sales, and the retirement of these fixed assets. Let's look at an asset master record. Back in our test system, we're looking at the asset master data for a 2019 Mercedes Sprinter. We see that the asset class for the Sprinter is vehicles. We could drill down and look at the value of this asset, including things like depreciation by pressing the asset values button in the bottom right. The final major sub module of the general ledger is bank accounting. It deals with all of the company's bank account transactions. It's used to reconcile all transactions recorded on bank statements and compare them with the transactions in the system to ensure that they balance. Let's look at a bank master record. Our test system is now displaying a bank master record for Chase Manhattan Bank. It includes the bank key and the Swift number. A major benefit of the way the SAP FI system is designed is that all of the sub modules are integrated and transactions are updated in real time. This means that accurate financial statements can be pulled from the system at a moment's notice.