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Configuring a Fiscal Year Variant in SAP
Article by: Rupal Patel

A Fiscal Year or financial year variant, for a business, is a period used for calculating annual financial statements. Due to special considerations this fiscal-year-variant may not be aligned with the regular calendar year. For legal reporting and record keeping it is essential to declare when this variant begins and when it ends. Majority of the businesses however, use the normal calendar year as their fiscal year.


For external reporting and also for minimizing chances of error the fiscal year is divided into posting periods. For better control of the business a good practice is to only keep the current posting period open and keep the rest closed.

  • No transaction can be posted to a closed posting period.
  • A closed posting period may not be re-opened, especially if the reports have already been submitted to IRS.
  • If errors are discovered in a closed posting period then corrections can only be posted in a special posting period with proper and detail description of the correction.
  • SAP allows a maximum of 16 posting periods in each fiscal year. It consists of 12 regular posting periods and 4 special periods which can be used for audit or tax adjustments to already closed periods.

When defining a fiscal year in SAP it is mandatory to know how many posting periods will it contain.


This article will discuss how to configure a fiscal year variant in SAP. SAP provides some preconfigured Fiscal Year Variants for example K1, K2, and V3. You may use any one of these variants if they meet your business requirements. SAP also allows you to configure a fiscal year variant from scratch.


A fiscal year is divided into posting periods. Before you can post documents, you must define posting periods in the fiscal year. Each posting period has a start and an end date.


You have the following options for defining fiscal year variants:

  • Calendar year
  • Non-Calendar year

Calendar year

If your fiscal year is the calendar year, the following specifications apply:

  • The fiscal year begins on January 1 and ends on December 31.
  • The each posting period corresponds to a calendar month.

Calendar Year
Figure 1

Non-Calendar Fiscal Year

Since non-calendar fiscal years may span over two calendar years, you will have to specify if the current fiscal year spans over to the next calendar year or the previous calendar year.

If your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, you must specify:

  • From which month your fiscal year start and end.

If fiscal year is a Non-Calendar year then we will have to specify year shift to make it one fiscal year. You can use the entries -1, 0, and +1 as year shift for this.


In this example, fiscal year is April to March. Fiscal year starts on April 2014 but after December it starts year 2015. After December 2014 all posting periods will be assigned to year shift "-1". Figure 2.


Year Shift -1
Figure 2

So if you're posting date is 02/01/2015 it will post in Period 11.


In this example, fiscal year is October to September. Fiscal year starts on October 2014 but after December it starts year 2015. From October 2014 to December 2014 all posting periods will be assigned to year shift "+1". Figure 3.


Year Shift +1
Figure 3


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