Financial Accounting

Financial Accounting (FI) includes Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Credit Management, Treasury, Financial Information System, General Ledger (G/L), and Extended G/L.
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SAP R/3 Accounting Modules
FI and Controlling (CO) are set up so that just one entry is required for each business transaction. There's no need to copy records from one subledger to another.
The General Ledger provides a complete picture of all business transactions (see Figure C.1). It gets its data from automatic postings from subledgers. All G/L numbers are tied to source documents. From the G/L level, you can zoom progressively to more detail until you get to the actual source document. The G/L collects all the accounts.
Figure C.1. One way a company structure can be set up in FI.
The flow chart in Figure C.2 illustrates a typical workflow for selling a product and receiving payment, which is FI's primary role in the sale of a product.
Figure C.2. A typical flow in Financial Accounting.
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Financial Accounting Help
For help on Financial Accounting, choose Help, Help Library, Financial Accounting.
Using SAP R/3's FI module is also beneficial for these reasons:
Flexible closing reports are available for daily, monthly, and yearly periods.
Non–SAP R/3 sources and data destinations can be accommodated by using Automatic Procedures to batch data in or out. This allows you to interface SAP R/3 to existing systems in your organization where required.
The Financial Information System helps you evaluate customers and vendors.
You can use Consolidation to aggregate the results from individual companies to a group of companies.
The main documents used in FI include invoices (in and out), credit notes, payments, and G/L. The main master files used in FI are Vendor and Customer. FI interfaces to MM purchasing for Accounts Payable and to SD sales for Accounts Receivable.