How to make trading partner a required entry (Part II)

How can we make Trading Partner a required entry while posting financial accounting documents for certain GL Accounts?
There are three possible alternatives to achieve this goal: Field Status Groups, Document Types and FI Validation. We will look at each of these options below.

1) Field Status Group
Field status groups can be used to make certain fields required, optional, display, or suppressed by using field status definition. There is a general belief among the SAP community that field status group can be used for Trading Partner as well. However, not all fields are available in field status group – trading partner is one such field that is not a part of 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 now be leveraged to influence Trading Partner (suppressed / required / optional). However, this option is generally not recommended by SAP. It may create inconsistencies while posting FI documents (OSS 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 Types
Document types can be configured such that Trading Partner will be available for input. Following fields need to be activated in Document Type setup.
- Transaction OBA7 – Document Types (underlying table T003)
o Partner Company can be input (T003-XMGES)
o Cross-company (T003-XGSUB)
This setup will open up Trading Partner at document level. However, it does not make Trading Partner a required entry.

3) FI Validation
FI validation can be used to 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 the Trading Partner is entered.

Conclusion

• Given 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 normally do not require ABAP programming unless a user-exit or table-lookup are to be used).
• A simple validation like the one shown in this example can go a long way in ensuring data consistency and accuracy

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

Validation details (figure 1)
Prerequisites:
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 that should be checked for Trading Partner

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

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

References:
SAP Note 1397715 - FI: Adding VBUND to the coding block from https://service.sap.com