Make Trading Partner a Required Entry Part II

By Ashish Sampat

This is Part II of Make Trading Partner a Required Entry Part I

Can You Make Trading Partner Required While Posting Financial Documents?

You have three alternatives:

1) Field Status Group

Field status groups can be used to make certain fields required, optional, display, or suppressed with field status definition, however trading partner is not available in field status group.

Trading partner field VBUND, data element RASSC can be enabled in field status group by adding it in table TCOBF Coding Block: Assignment of Modif and Field Names from COBL. With this change, field status groups can be leveraged to influence Trading Partner (suppressed / required / optional). However, this option is not recommended by SAP. It may create inconsistencies while posting FI documents (SAP Note 1397715 “Adding VBUND to the coding block”2)

• Transaction OBC4 – Field Status variants - GL Account level
  
  
• Transaction OB41 – Field Status Groups - Posting Key level

2) Document Type

Document types can be configured so that trading partner is available for input. The following fields need to be activated in document type:

Transaction OBA7 – Document Types Table T003

o Partner Company can be input T003-XMGES

o Cross-company T003-XGSUB

This setup will open up trading partner at the document level. However, it does not make trading partner a required entry.

3) FI Validation

FI validation can prevent document postings where trading partner is missing for certain GL accounts. A validation in FI has three sections: Pre-requisite, Check and Message. These sections are explained below with example.
- Transaction OB28 – Financial Accounting validation configuration transaction
- Transaction GS01 – Create set master data transaction, generally not transported
- Transaction GS02 – Change set master data transaction, generally not transported

Prerequisite:
For certain set of accounts defined in set ZGL_TRAD_PART_REQD – figure 2
For certain sets of users defined in set ZUSR_TRAD_PART_REQD – figure 3
For certain document types defined in set ZDOC_TYPE_TRAD_PART_REQD – figure 4

Check:
If Trading Partner is blank
Message:
Return an error with appropriate message

The implication of this validation: the user cannot move forward with this transaction until trading partner is entered.

Conclusion

With the shortcomings of Field Status Group and Document Type options, these two options are generally not preferred.

FI validations are easy to configure and maintain. They generally do not require ABAP programming unless a user-exit or table-lookup are needed.

A simple validation like the one shown in this example can ensure data consistency and accuracy.

Figure 1: OB28 – FI Validation for missing Trading Partner for GL Accounts, Users and Document Types

Prerequisite:
BSEG-HKONT IN ZGL_TRAD_PART_REQD AND

BKPF-USNAM IN ZUSR_TRAD_PART_REQD AND

BKPF-BLART IN ZDOC_TYPE_TRAD_PART_REQD

Check:
BSEG-VBUND <> ''

Message:
Error Z1 032 Trading Partner is required for GL

Figure 2: GS01 / GS02 – Create / Maintain Set to define GL Accounts checked for Trading Partner

Figure 3: GS01 / GS02 – Create / Maintain Set to define Users to be checked for Trading Partner

Figure 4: GS01 / GS02 – Create / Maintain Set to define Document Types to be checked

This is Part II of Make Trading Partner a Required Entry Part I

Reference:

SAP Note 1397715 - FI - Adding VBUND to the coding block

Glossary

Document Type

 The document type is a key that is used to classify accounting documents and distinguish between business transactions to be posted. The document type is entered in the document header and applies to the whole document.

Field Status Group

Field status group is used to manage the fields of the required object. If field status group is defined for a general ledger master then it's defined to manage the fields to be used while creating the master data.

FI Validations

 FI validations allow you to create your own Boolean statements without making any changes to the standard system. A validation can consist of up to 999 steps. You can therefore validate data against any number of Boolean statements before the data is posted.