In S/4 HANA 2020, SAP has released a new functionality called "Bank Sub-Ledger" that will allow companies with a large number of Bank Accounts to reduce their number GL Accounts in their Chart of Accounts significantly and manage them with just a few GL accounts.
Traditionally, in SAP we would have one GL Main Bank Account representing each House Bank and Bank account number (Account ID) combination that you have open with a given bank, plus a series of outgoing and incoming Bank clearing accounts for this combination. These accounts represent your issued checks not cashed by a vendor or Payments that you have received that you have not deposited yet or cleared with the bank. Depending on your business requirements, the different payments methods you have and other situations, you could end up with 4, 5 or 6 of these Bank clearing accounts. We also called them bank sub-accounts. Finally if your account is held in foreign currency, you will also need a Bank adjustment GL Account to post your foreign currency valuation at Month End.
It will look like this
105100 Bank Main account (House Bank)
105101 Bank outgoing checks
105102 Bank Incoming payments
105103 Bank Lockbox clearing
105104 Bank outgoing electronic payments
105109 Bank adjustment account
At the end, you will have something that looks similar to this for each bank account that you have on a given Company Code. You might not have Lockbox or checks in some regions, but you will need several of this accounts to have a proper design and flexibility.
Now ... if your Company (Company Code) has many Bank accounts scattered all over the place among different banks you will end up with a large number of GL accounts within your Chart of Accounts dedicated only for your Banks. Total number of Bank Accounts x6. If you have 10 Bank Accounts, you will end up with 60 G/L Accounts only dedicated to this.
With the new S/4 HANA 2020 Bank Sub-Ledger Account, you can reduce this from 60 GL accounts to GL 6 accounts.
There are already several people that have done Blogs about how to configure and use this functionality in SCN and other sites as well. But ... Nobody has posted anything yet on how to configure the Electronic Bank Statement for this Bank Sub-Ledger functionality.
The traditional way of configuring the EBS when assigning GL Accounts to Accounting symbols and using the masking approach, WILL NOT WORK ! It will give you an error when you try to process an EBS file since the system is not able to do the account determination correctly. Your EBS posting rules will just fail.
This was the way to configure your Account assignment to your Account Symbols in the past when we did not have the Bank Sub-Ledger.
As I mentioned, if you do it like this; the system will not find the GL Accounts, the Account determination will fail and you will not be able to do any postings.
Now with the New Bank Sub-Ledger functionality, instead of doing the traditional masking setup, you need to configure it by putting the full GL Account number instead of masking the beginning of the string.
Configuration for EBS with Bank Sub-Leger
Once you set it up like this, the system will start doing the Account determination properly once again.
A few notes:
#1 - There is a possibility to do a Migration from the old way to the new Bank Sub-Ledger. So, if you are Migrating to Bank Sub-Ledger, you will also need to adjust your EBS configuration. Because, most likely the migration program will not migrate and adapt this config it just changes the GL Master Data setup and other transactional tables.
#2 - OSS Note 3007105 from SAP has stated some restrictions and exceptions for this functionality. It cannot be used with Bill of Exchange Banks/Accounts and it does not work with the Foreign Exchange currency valuation process (FAGL-FCV).
This last statement is not 100% accurate to a certain point. FAGL_FCV is still able to take into consideration the Bank Sub-Ledger Open Item accounts and the Main Bank accounts balances to calculate and valuate them. But what it does not give you is a detailed posting that will specify which House Bank and Bank Account ID has valuated, but it will still valuate those amounts properly. So one of the main restrictions might not be that important at all.
I reached out to SAP with an OSS Support message asking if S/4 HANA 2021 had remediated this situation and FAGL_FCV was now working properly and they told me that they have not modified this program yet and that they will not modify it for future versions. Instead, they told me they are planning on releasing an "Advance Valuation program" that will handle it properly. But there is no timeline for that release yet.
If your Company and/or Project needs to implement this, or any of the functionalities described in my Blog, or advise about them, do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will be happy to provide you my services.
