Line Item Display:FI General Ledger Account Master Records

You use line item display to display line items from the account. For line item display, the system must list all the line items for an account.

You indicate whether you require line item display in the master record of the G/L account. For accounts with line item display, the system uses special indices to define the link between the account and the document. For accounts with many transactions, a corresponding number of indices must be defined and read for line item display. This means that when posting items to such accounts and displaying line items, additional storage space and system time are required. Therefore, you should not use line item display for the following accounts:

• Reconciliation accounts where line item display is called up from the subledger only.
  For example, you can call up the line items for the accounts "Receivables" and "Payables" from the vendor or customer accounts.
• Accounts that have a summation function in your accounts and that are analyzed by another application, such as the accounts "Revenue" and "Stock," for example.
• Output and input tax accounts, since tax information is required only in connection with the document. For example, the system checks the tax line item when you post the document. Consequently, you do not need to reconcile output tax accounts.

Sort Sequence for Line Item Display

With line item display, the items are sorted on the screen. The system uses certain selected document fields for the standard sort sequence. These are:

1. Special G/L indicator

2. Clearing date

3. Clearing document number

4. Allocation

5. Fiscal year

6. Document number

If you look at cleared items in an account with open item management, the items are displayed according to clearing date and clearing document number. This allows you to see the relationship of clearing transactions. With open items, the Allocation field is used to specify the display sequence, since the fields Clearing date and Clearing document number have not yet been filled.

The special G/L indicator is used to group special G/L transactions. Special G/L transactions include bills of exchange and down payments.

Sort Sequence Using the Allocation Field

You can set up your own sort term using the Allocation field.

If you specify that the bill of exchange due date is placed in the field Allocation, the documents in the account in which you keep the bill of exchange liabilities are sorted according to due date. As a result, you can have an overview at any time of bills of exchange that fall due on a particular day.

The following options exist for the field Allocation:

• The system enters data in the field automatically.

You enter a key in the master record of the account in the Sort key field, which displays the required layout rule for the Allocation field.

• You enter data in the field when creating the document.

The layout rule in the master record specifies which entry the system transfers from the document header or from the line item to the allocation field on the date of posting.

In the master record of the account "Down payments received," you specify that the customer account number is to be entered in the field Allocation when you post to the account. When you display line items on the screen, all documents posted to this account are displayed with the customer account number in ascending order. Consequently, all down payments made by a particular customer are displayed together.

The layout rules are already defined in the standard system. You can change or add to them as required.

You can change the key for the layout rule in the master record at any time. The new layout rule takes effect from the time of the change: when you display line items, all items posted after the change are displayed according to the new layout rule. The allocation remains unchanged, however, for documents that have already been posted.

The field Allocation is used to display line items if you do not select any other sort sequence. You can find further information on freely-definable sort sequences in the section titled "Functions in Document Processing" in FI Document Posting.

Layout of Posting Screens

You can lay out the screens for posting individually for each G/L account. To do this, you can assign one of the following three statuses to the fields in the screens:

• Suppressed
• Entry permitted (optional field)
• Entry required (required field)

To avoid the need for assigning a field status to each field in a document, fields have been organized into field groups.

The field group "Terms of payment" contains the fields for the terms of payment key and the fields for specifying payment periods in days and cash discount percentages.