Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

Drilldown reports have become more widespread with the latest versions of SAP ERP. What used to be available only for management reports in the Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) and Project Systems (PS) modules is now being used for financial statement reporting (with the SAP General ledger), Accounts Payable and Receivable Reports and many others. For that reason I want to show you a way that you can easily convert amounts that are displayed in drilldown reports into different currencies.

A typical example of where this may be used is when you have a month-end translation rate that you apply to your financial transactions at the end of the month. Although SAP translates currencies on a real-time basis, the rates are usually on a historical basis and will not reflect any short-term fluctuations that may have occurred.

You probably already know that SAP can translate the values from one currency to another as long as you have maintained the currency pair in the exchange rate table (TCURR). This table stores currencies by Exchange Rate Type. The default exchange rate type that is used in all company codes is “M – Average Rate” (unless you decide to change it to a different exchange rate type per document type in transaction OBA7). This means that any foreign currency is translated into the company code currency using this exchange rate. If you also want to translate your figures into a different exchange rate using an exchange rate type other than M, you would need to create a translation key by doing the following:

Go to transaction SM30 and enter table V_T242Q and hit the “Maintain” button. You will be prompted to enter an Application class (this controls which module the settings are to be maintained for). Choose the appropriate application class according to the drop-down list. Note that for the SAP General Ledger, you should choose Application class “FBRG - FI: Flexible general ledger”. You can then click on “New Entries” and enter a description for the Currency Translation Type, and enter the exchange rate type that you want to use (in the exchange rate table). You can then choose whether you want a fixed or variable ‘To Currency’ and ‘Currency Translation Date’ and whether you want an ‘Inverse Exchange Rate’. When you press the ‘Enter’ key you will be asked for the relevant ‘To Currency’ and ‘’Currency Translation Date’. You only need to specify these if you want them to be fixed, if not simply hit the ‘Enter’ key again. You can then save your settings and return to the initial screen.

In order to utilize the translation key that you set up, you need to ensure that the exchange rate type that you specified has been maintained for the relevant currencies in the exchange rate table (TCURR).

To change the currency displayed on a drilldown report to the one that you have set up, you need to execute the relevant drilldown report and click on the “Currency Translation” button (which has the “Dollar” and “Yen” sign on top of the number “100”) and enter the ‘To currency’ and drop-down in the “Translation Key” field. You will then see all the translation keys that exist, and you can choose the one that you have set up for the specific currency translation that you want.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.