Making Trading Partner a Required Entry – Field Status Group

Learn more about field status group in this excerpt from Expert Tips to Unleash the Full Potential of SAP Controlling by Ashish Sampat. 

How can we make Trading Partner a required entry while posting financial accounting documents for certain GL Accounts? There are three possible ways to do so:

Field Status Group
There is a general belief among the SAP community that the field status group can be used to make certain fields required, optional, display, or suppressed by using field status definition (many a times interchangeably referred as field status group or field status variant). However, not all fields are available in the field status group—Trading Partner
is one such field that is not a part of the field status group.

Trading Partner (VBUND) can be enabled in Field Status Group by adding it in table TCOBF (Coding Block: Assignment of Modif and Field Names from COBL). With this change, field status groups can now be leveraged to influence Trading Partner (suppressed/required/optional). However, this option is not recommended by SAP. It may create inconsistencies while posting FI documents (SAP Note 1397715 “Adding VBUND
to the coding block”2)

• Transaction OBC4—Field Status variants
• Transaction OB14—Field Status definition
• Transaction OB41—Field Status groups (Posting Key level)

Keep reading to learn more about the other two options for making Trading Partner a required entry while posting financial accounting documents for certain GL Accounts.

This book is written for SAP Controlling (CO) professionals who want to learn expert tips to optimize their system performance for configuration, reconciliation, and reporting. Using a fictional chocolate manufacturing case study, each tip provides detailed information on aspects of the functionality, how it can help you, why you should use it, and how to use it including SAP configuration steps. Obtain best practices for optimizing cost allocation methods, expediting material ledger close, and utilizing cost center overhead charges. Troubleshoot product costing messages and find out how to prevent GL account overrides during inventory posting transactions. Walk through best practices for effectively maintaining master data and standard costing methods. By using an integrated practical example and screenshots, the author informs readers on how to get the most out of their SAP ERP system.

• Optimize SAP ERP Controlling configuration, reconciliation, and reporting
• Transaction processing tips to ensure accurate data capture
• Instructions for avoiding common month-end close pain points
• Reporting and reconciliation best practices

Author Ashish Sampat is a qualified finance and costing professional with nearly two decades of industry experience in the SAP Finance and Controlling space. Ashish has been an SAP consultant for most of his career with various consulting organizations and now works as an independent SAP FI/CO consultant. He has provided solutions in several areas of SAP Controlling including product costing, material ledger, and cost center accounting to global clients in consumer packaged goods, life sciences, and industrial sectors. Born and educated in India, Ashish now lives in suburban Chicago with his wife and two kids. Ashish is also the author of First Steps in SAP Controlling.