Alternate Chart of accounts

Question

Hi SAP Gurus,
In  a productions environment, we have a requirement as follows:
For the company code in Spain as per the new legal requirement, we need to change the alternate chart of accounts.
The client has many company codes and use Group chart of accounts also.
Is there any specific SAP patch available for this ?

Answer 1

Hi Suresh,
you mean the country chart of accounts assigned to the company code in field T001-KTOP2 (not to mix up with the operational CoA T001-KTOPL).
If you are using a country CoA, field SKB1-ALKT alternative account number in the GL account master record is checked against that CoA. If you want to change it, you may have a current country CoA with plenty of GL accounts, assigned to your operational accounts.
To change the country CoA is an easy task in transaction OBY6. (first you have to create the new CoA, specify at least 1 account group and a retained earnings account for the start).
Then you have to create new accounts in your new CoA (FSP0 only, no FS00 or FSS0).
Finally, and this is the main point, you have to change the current assignments. The issue is that if your have a country CoA assigned to the company code, a change of the alternative account is only possible if the account has no balance. To remove the current balance to another GL and reverse this afterwards is not so easy for some type of accounts (post automatically only, reconciliation accounts, etc.) So you have 2 options for this change:
1. Write a custom ABAP which will update your SKB1 records without checking the balance.
2. Create the country CoA but do NOT assign it to your company code yet. (Remove any existing assignment). Now you can do a mass change using transaction MASS or manually account by account, regardless of the balance. Make sure you enter alternative accounts only that are created in the country CoA.
3. Finally, assign the country CoA to the company code.
After this, the line items posted before the change are not in sync with the master record's alternative accounts (BSEG-LOKKT <> SKB1-ALTKT), but as most standard reports are reading the CURRENT alternative accounts from the master records anyway, that should not be a problem.
Hope that helps, points welcome
Csaba