Analysis Of SAP FBL3N Report And It’s Significance

The Purpose Of The FBL3N Report

The FBL3N report is used to list line items for multiple accounts across multiple company codes. This functionality is provided by the selection screen of the report. It is also possible to display items from more than one General Ledger account in a customized layout. This report allows changes to individual documents or to carry out mass changes to posted line items displayed in the report.

Search help is available to enable a detailed selection of General Ledger accounts which allows access to various possible entries. The search help screen is shown in figure 1 below.

Concept Of Line Item Status

The status selection button is relevant only for General Ledger accounts with open items management is enabled. For such General Ledger accounts, it is possible to display the open items, cleared items or all the items depending on the selection made in the Line Item Selection box of the FBL3N report.

•  OPEN ITEMS: This option is used to display all open items that were posted up to the key date and then cleared, or which have not yet been cleared as yet. The current date is the default value for the key date. This is an optional field and if it is left empty, the system still defaults the current date while executing the report.
• CLEARED ITEMS: This option is used to display all the items that have been cleared by the current date. It is possible to make further selections and display the items that have been cleared within a certain range of dates but which were open up to a certain key date.
•  ALL ITEMS: This option is used to display both the open as well as the cleared items which have been posted up to the specified date. If the posting date restriction is left blank, all the items that were posted within the last ninety days are selected to be displayed in the report.

Selection Of The Type Of Line Item To Be Displayed

The FBL3N report allows selection of line items on the basis of the type of the documents and the line items. The following 3 selections are allowed:

•  NORMAL ITEMS: This selection displays those items which do not belong to any of the other two selectable categories. These items don’t have a special General Ledger document status and do not represent a special General Ledger transaction.
•  NOTED ITEMS: The noted items are line items that are entered to remind of a pending business transaction but are not an actual transaction themselves and so are not shown in the account line items. They are used to represent special General Ledger transactions and are managed by special General Ledger indicators. An example of a noted item is a down payment request. When a down payment request is entered into the system using a special General Ledger indicator, the account balances are not updated but it is shown as an open line item in the FBL3N report to remind of the due payment.
• PARKED ITEMS:This selection displays all the parked documents satisfying the remaining selection criteria. Parked documents are incomplete documents which do not update the data for the transaction. These can be completed and posted at a later date by the user.

The display variant is the ABAP List Viewer variant which is used to start the program. If nothing is entered the system makes use of the standard variant 1SAP.

Ensuring A Stable System

If the number of items to be displayed as a result of the selection criteria becomes too large, then the load on the system increases as it tries to prepare the output of the report. This can make the system unstable and cause it to stop responding. In extreme cases the report execution may get terminated with an ABAP dump. Such a situation may happen if some wrong range is entered in the selection criteria which select an extremely large number of line item records to be displayed. This can be prevented by specifying the maximum number of items to be displayed. If the maximum number is reached based on the selection criteria, the selection is terminated there and the list extracted up to that point is displayed. For e.g. if 1000 is entered in the maximum number of items to be displayed, then the selection of items will stop if it exceeds 1000 and the first 1000 line items will be displayed. If the field is left blank or set equal 0, a selection is made without restrictions.

Significance Of The Report

• The FBL3N report lists the line items for the specified selections sorted by company code and then by General Ledger accounts. The details of a line item i.e. the document to which the line item belongs can be displayed from within the report by simply double clicking on the line item. The report displays the line items by extracting the data from the line item data table BSEG. The header data for the documents is extracted from the table BKPF.
• Each line item is displayed with a check box which can be used to select multiple line items. Once multiple selections have been made, mass changes can be made to multiple documents simultaneously.
• A number of columns are displayed by default for the selected line items. More columns can be selected by changing the report layout.
• The report can be used to provide summation of balances according to different criteria.
• Different layouts can be applied to display the line item data in different formats and to sort the data according to different criteria.
• ABC analysis can be carried out on the selection data from within the report to categorize the selected line items on the basis of their importance into separate categories.

Sample Run Of The FBL3N Report

STEP 1:Go to the navigation path as shown below or execute the transaction FBL3N from the SAP Easy Access menu screen.

STEP 2:Enter the data as shown below on the selection screen and click the execute button or press the F8 key to execute the report.

STEP 3: The output of the report is displayed as shown below. The General Ledger account line items are selected and displayed according to the criteria entered on the selection screen.