Division of a company for which you can create financial statements for external reporting.
The accounting principles US GAAP and IFRS require companies to perform segment reporting. You can define segments in your SAP system for this purpose. You find the appropriate IMG activity in Customizing under Enterprise Structure ® Definition ® Financial Accounting ® Define Segment.
You can enter a segment in the master record of a profit center. The characteristic Segment is only released in combination with the characteristic Profit Center. If no segment is specified manually during posting (only possible for transactions in Financial Accounting), the segment is determined from the master record of the profit center. This profit center can also be assigned manually or derived.
If you want to apply different rules to derive the segment during posting, you can define your own rules for this. You find the corresponding settings in Customizing under Financial Accounting (New) ® Financial Accounting Global Settings (New) ® Tools ® Customer Enhancements ® Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) ® Segment Derivation.
The document splitting procedure is the prerequisite for creating financial statements at any time for the Segment dimension. For this, you need to set up a zero balance setting for the Segment characteristic. You find the document splitting settings in Customizing under General Ledger Accounting (New) ® Business Transactions ® Document Splitting.
US GAAP requires a virtually complete balance sheet at the segment level for segment reporting (essentially everything apart from stockholders' equity). The segment is defined as a subarea of a company with activities that generate expenses and revenues, with an operating result that is regularly used by management for profit assessment and resource allocation purposes, and for which separate financial data is available.
IFRS has almost exactly the same requirements for segment reporting.
You can use the Segment dimension to represent the segment levels.
If you want to represent segments in two dimensions (primary and secondary segmentation), you can do this as follows: You can use the Segment dimension for the primary segmentation. You can represent the secondary segmentation in your system. You can do this by including a customer field Region in General Ledger Accounting, for example.