Field Status Variant in SAP

The purpose of this blogs to explain about the field status variant in SAP.

What is Field Status Variant?

◉ In SAP FICO, a field status variant is a predefined set of filed statuses that control the status of fields is a screen for a particular transaction or master record in SAP.

◉ A field has one of the three statuses:

1) Suppressed: The field status is hidden from display

2) Required Entry: Status is also known as mandatory

3) Optional Entry: It is up to you to make entry, if you don’t enter anything you can keep blank

All the fields on a document normally have a field status. However, you can’t attach a field status to some fields, such as those in the document header and reference number (you do it in Document Type to mark it as required or configuration setting in Rules for Changing Document). You can, however, switch between required and optional entry field designations in the document type for such fields.

◉ The field status is influenced by posting keys, specifications in the document, and the field status groups. For easy administration, SAP groups field statuses into field status groups (FSGs) that are defined in the company code area of each SAP G/L account. The FSG determines which fields are ready for input (Required Entry or Optional Entry) and which are hidden (Suppressed) during document entry. You can’t enter an FSG in the customer or vendor accounts because it’s determined from their respective reconciliation accounts via the SAP G/L account number in their master records.

◉ We recommend that you designate field status via the FSG in the SAP G/L accounts, which helps you with the more account-specific screen layout. In SAP G/L, you can’t differentiate field status by posting key because there are only two such keys (40 and 50) for postings to SAP G/L accounts, and the status Optional Entry Field assigned to these keys has no effect on the field status. Regarding reconciliation accounts, you don’t make any differentiated field status definition via the master record for these special SAP G/L accounts; instead, you use the debit and credit posting keys.

◉ SAP uses link rules to overcome conflict between field statuses. As you can see in below, when one field status is Suppressed and the other is Optional Entry, the resulting field status, per the link rules, is Suppressed. On the other hand, if there is a combination of Suppressed and Required Entry, then this leads to an error due to conflict. The rule determines what the resulting status should be between the two conflicting statuses for the same field. Field status has the priority sequence of suppress, display, required and optional.