Universal Journal in SAP S/4HANA

The Universal Journal has made business life much easier for users
It allows fast decisions based on financial and management accounting picture
The Universal Journal combines Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) into one pool.
This single source of truth collects all accounting-relevant transactions and makes them available
to all relevant application components

Application components are Financial Accounting (General Ledger), Controlling, Asset

Accounting, and Material Ledger.
The advantages of having all this information in one place are
No reconciliation activities are needed, data redundancies are eliminated, and line items are
entered only once.
In order to bring the two areas closer together, reconciliation ledgers were developed and, with
the introduction of the architecture known as FI-GL (new) or New GL, real-time integration of FI
and CO was made possible
Is there a Single Source of “Truth” with Universal Journal?

The reports in all components use data from the same journal and thus known as Universal
journal.
For this functionality to work there is a change in master data, architecture of the tables and also
in configuration.
A big advantage of this universal journal is that reconciliation efforts are enforced by design.
Adding to the advantage, reporting based on the ACDOCA data is fast and flexible.
Let us see the major changes in these areas
All cost elements (primary and secondary) need to be portrayed as G/L accounts.
Consequently, we no longer need to enter the master data for cost elements separately
We only need to create G/L accounts from now on. You will not find any transactions related
Cost elements.
Below screen-prints between ECC EHP7 for SAP ERP 6.0 and S4HANA
ECC:
S4HANA:

Now, let us see what does the one source truth means in SAP system.
FI document which triggered entries in BSEG, FAGLFLEXA, FAGLFLEXT, COBK, COEJ and
COEP tables (and some more BSIS, etc) in ECC.
Compare it with a posting in S4HANA ON PREMISE 1.0, all the information is recorded in
BKPF (header) and ACDOCA (line items).
Updates are no longer made to these old tables.
You can continue to use reports that use data from these old tables.
This is because compatibility views for a data request from one of these tables read the data from
ACDOCA.
Let us compare the views in these ECC tables with ACDOCA.
FI tables:
For example we see the data in FI Tables
BKPF :

Enter table name and click on display

Click on contents
Click on execute

Here we can see the data of BKPF table

BSEG:

Enter table name and click on display

Here we can see the data of BSEG table in ECC

FAGLFLEXA:

Now see the data of FAGLFLEXA table in ECC

CO Tables:
COBK:
Now check the data for COBK table
COEP:

Check the data for COEP table also

ACDOCA (Universal Journal):

The Universal Journal combines Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) into one pool.
All the data which is present in above FI and CO tables it combined and finally stored in a single
table called ACDOCA Table
It was only with the introduction of the SAP HANA database technology that the FI and CO
components into one physical table (ACDOCA).
SAP HANA is a columnar database which can able to aggregate huge numbers of line items
within seconds.
In SAP ECC We have tables.
When we wrote the report on tables it will fetch the data based on some input value
The system would read the complete tables based on those parameters and then hold the relevant
data into structure
After holding the data into the structure then the same data will display into a report.
Now in S4HANA, There is no concept of aggregates.
There are some tables which combines multiple tables data into one table
For e.g. MATDOC, ACDOCA tables in S4HANA
MACDOC:
The MATDOC is a transparent table.
However, in S/4, since HANA is a columnar database, the system directly goes to the specific
value and shows in a report or query.
Moreover, this is just one table and not more tables as earlier. So the processing is much faster.
If it takes me 2 mins run a report on 2 tables then will it take me 2 seconds to run the same report
on MATDOC
ACDOCA:
The universal data table is ACDOCA 
It contains all of the line item documents from FI, FI-AA and CO.