Whenever a financial transaction takes place in the system, the postings concerning it are created by the predefined posting types and rules defined in IFS/Accounting Rules. This means that you do not have to do anything manually, as long as you have defined your rules correctly.
However, sometimes you want to decide a code part value, depending on specific purchase order information, i.e., you choose not to decide a rule for this code part for all posting types affected or it is not possible to decide a rule. In these cases, you must manually establish the relationship between the code part and the purchase order or purchase requisition by entering a pre-posting connected to the purchase requisition or order. The code part value that you enter as a pre-posting will then affect several postings created for this purchase requisition or order. One example is a purchase order where you want the postings for purchasing to charge a specific Cost Center.
The postings that will be affected by the pre-posting are generally all postings concerning expenses, revenues, and WIP. This is determined by Posting Types per Business Event Analysis where you can see whether a posting for a specific posting event is affected by the pre-posting on the purchase requisition/order or not. Note that pre-posting will generally not affect the inventory cost postings (M1 posting). Pre-posting will be used when posting transactions registered for non-inventory parts, no-number parts and eventually overheads. An exception to this are transactions related to material connected to a project.
The lines inherit the pre-postings only if both purchasing and demand sites (the header and line site, respectively) belong to the same financial company. If these sites belong to different companies, the pre-posting information on the order header and the order lines may be different (not only the value, but the configuration of the code string may be different).
With the exception of a plain pre-posting, there are two more alternatives when you may want to use pre-postings:
This functionality is only allowed for non-inventory registered purchase parts, no-number parts and inventory purchase parts when the ownership of the purchase order line is Company Rental Asset. This means that, if the current part is an inventory part with another ownership, the Distribution section in the Pre Posting dialog box will not be accessible. Distribution of costs means that you have the possibility to enter pre-postings that are distributed to various accounts. It is possible to change the distribution of costs in terms of code part values and percentages as long as the order is below the Closed status. When entering the percentages, you should note that the sum of the percentages must total 100%.
The information entered in Posting Control, Pre Posting/Posting and Pre Posting/Distribution are combined according to certain rules. If, for instance, you want to combine a pre-posting with a cost distribution, it is important to know how it works.
The following is an example of a possible pre-posting combination entered for a purchase order. In this example, we have a pre-posting which is set up on code part B and code part C (table 2). There is also a cost distribution on code part C and D (table 3).
The following information is entered in the Posting Control page:
Table 1: Posting Control
| Code Part A | Code Part B | Code Part C | Code Part D | Code Part D | Code Part E | Code Part F |
| BB | 200 | B | HK | 456 | 17 |
The following information is entered in the Pre Posting/Posting section:
Table 2: Pre Posting/Posting
| Code Part A | Code Part B | Code Part C | Code Part D | Code Part D | Code Part E | Code Part F |
| 333 | 45 |
The following information is entered in the Pre Posting/Distribution section:
Table 3: Pre Posting/Distribution
| Code Part A | Code Part B | Code Part C | Code Part D | Code Part D | Code Part E | Code Part F |
| 12 | A | |||||
| 22 | AA | |||||
| 44 | AAA |
Since some of the used posting types are assigned to be affected by the pre-posting, the information entered in table 1 is overridden by the information in table 2. In turn, that information is overridden by the information entered in table 3. Because the pre-posting was distributed to three different lines, a possible result could be as shown in the table below (table 4).
Table 4: Possible results
| Code Part A | Code Part B | Code Part C | Code Part D | Code Part D | Code Part E | Code Part F |
| BB | 333 | 12 | A | HK | 456 | 17 |
| BB | 333 | 22 | AA | HK | 456 | 17 |
| BB | 333 | 44 | AAA | HK | 456 | 17 |