Does your company use FFIDs to perform month-end activity?

[Former Member]

How does your company perform month-end financial activity (ex: inventory close, account postings, GL close, etc.)?

Do your users perform this activity using their FFIDs? Do they just use their regular ids? Are these activities set up as regular scheduled jobs? etc.

For several years now, our users have been performing this activity using their FFIDs, because at one time a consultant told our management to do it this way. Of course this kind of mass update activity is just the sort of thing that SAP tells you to NOT use FFIDs for. However our management is also leery of giving this kind of access to a regular userid.

So we're kind of stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and would like to see how other companies are handling these situations.

Thanks.

[Former Member]

I would say month end activity is a routine task and should not really be done by firefighter. It is the actual responsibilty of the person doing that task.

Regards,

Chinmaya

[Former Member]

Hi Bob,

I'll take a stab at this even though I am not the financial person; I handle the SAP security authorizations and the FF ids;

We have a standard set of defined batch jobs that perform the month end processing; these jobs are executed through a schedular by our computer operations staff; the output of these jobs is available to the proper financial users. The user assigned to execute these jobs is a non-dialog user (system user) that has the authorizations for any production access.

We do not use FF ids outside of our IT department; the business users are defined with role authorizations that address their functional needs; various financial areas are defined here (e.g. AP, AR, GL,etc) and the roles assigned to the proper users. This includes various levels such as managers , administrators, supervisors, etc.

The IT users are defined with FF ids in order to address production issues as well as assist if needed the business user with production support. Purpose for this as you know is to record all activity of the T users in production that could result in production data updates. this addresses the SOD issues and monitoring when the auditors are in for the reviews.

Using FF ids by business users to perform month end tasks would most likely result in an enormous amout of logging since there woudl / could be mass updates. The audit trail would probably be very cumbersome should someone be required to review it.

hope these comments help

Jerry Synoga

630-758-2021