There are several approaches to access SAP® data.

SAP®-transactions as e.g. SE16 can be used to locally download files as spreadsheet in Excel format or as text file. Afterwards the data can be analyzed with appropriate tools (Excel™, ACL™, Access™ etc.).

SAP® is very special considering currency fields. As an example let’s have a look at this document:

Cur­ren­cy fields in SAP® - 2

This posting is an outgoing payment in local currency JPY (Japanese Yen). 11,000.00 had been posted to the vendor account C.E.B. New York.

This record can directly be displayed with transaction SE16 by entering the following in table BSAK (cleared vendor items).

• the document number 1500000014
• company code 3000
• fiscal year 1996

Cur­ren­cy fields in SAP® - 3

The displayed record has significant differences from our posting document from above. The currency amount in field ‘Amount’ is displayed as 111,00 instead of 11.100,00 JPY!

Cur­ren­cy fields in SAP® - 4

This has tremendous impact on analytics that run on SAP® Downloads, because in certain circumstances there could be values differently stored than displayed with data browser of SE16. Especially currency fields may, but do not have to be affected. But what could be the reason then, and how do these cases differ?

The answer is that SAP® ALWAYS stores amounts with 2 decimals in the database. This works fine for the Euro, as Euro has Cents and are stored with 2 decimals. If the amount is 5 Euros, then 5,00 is stored, 5 Euros and 10 Cents -> 5,10, or 5 Euros and 11 Cents (5,11) etc.

But then there are currencies, as the Japanese Yen from the example, which have no decimals at all. Other currencies maybe have 3 or 4 decimals but in the database only 2 decimals are stored.

For this reason SAP® introduced a separate table named TCURX, where the number of decimals per currency can be found, and provides the factor by which an amount must be multiplied to be properly displayed.