‘Tolerances’ are defined in the system to facilitate dealing with the differences arising out of accounting transactions and to instruct the system on how to proceed further. Normally, you define tolerances (either in ‘absolute terms’ or in ‘percentages’) beyond which the system will not allow you to post a document should there be a difference.
In SAP, tolerances are defined per Company Code and there are several types:
- Employee tolerance
- Customer/vendor tolerance
- GL account clearing tolerance
You will define an ‘employee tolerance group’ in the system and assign the employees to these groups. While defining the tolerance group you will specify:
- Upper limits for various posting procedures
- Amount per document
- Amount per open account item
- Cash discount, in percentage
- Permitted payment differences
How much over or under payment an employee is allowed to process. This is defined both in absolute values and in percentages.
Besides defining the above two, at the Company Code level, you will also define similar tolerances for customer/vendor tolerance group. Once defined, each of the customers (vendors) is assigned to one of these groups. Here also, you define the ‘permitted payment differences’.
While processing, the system compares the tolerance of an employee against the customer tolerance (or vendor tolerance or the GL) and applies the most restrictive of the two.