SAP Authorization Trace - Simple Overview of Authorizations
In-house role maintenance
The indirect role assignment uses the evaluation paths PROFLO and PROFLINT for assigning the PFCG roles to the corresponding users. However, these evaluation methods ignore the object CP (central person), which represents the business partner in SAP CRM. In transaction PFUD, which provides for the user comparison, the evaluation paths US_ACTGR and SAP_TAGT are used. Again the object CP is not known.
In many distributed organisations, the Profit Centre is used to map out the distributed units. However, this was only possible for FI with additional programming. In integrated data flows in SAP ERP, the sending application usually does not check the authorization objects of the receiving application. Financial Accounting (FI) in SAP does not check permissions for cost centres and profit centres. However, depending on the case of use, this may be necessary, e.g. if distributed entities are to operate as small enterprises within the enterprise and only collect and view data for this particular unit at a time. With the introduction of the new general ledger, SAP has technically merged the financial accounting and the profit centre account, so that the question of the inclusion of profit centre allowances in FIs becomes even more important.
Authorization roles (transaction PFCG)
If such information is available from the past, it should be checked whether all topics have been implemented in accordance with the comments. If one or the other recommendation has not been implemented, this circumstance should in any case be documented in a comprehensible manner, or it should be possible to provide a comprehensible justification. However, it is not sufficient to focus only on the improvement potentials that have been presented, because it must be ensured that all those points that have not been criticized in the past will continue to fit. Preparation is made much more difficult if there are no helpful comments or reports from the previous fiscal year, or if it is a first-time audit or a change of auditor. What all does the IT auditor look at during the annual audit? There are topics that every auditor looks at because there are standards for doing so, however it is common for the auditor to perform additional audit procedures in the IT audit depending on the strategy of the overall audit. In this newsletter we want to focus on the most important standard audit topics on the process level and the IT controls defined therein in the context of the SAP® system.
After the functional specification has been removed, the implementation can begin: To do this, first create your custom authorization object and implement the permission check provided. The next step is to maintain the SU24 transaction proposal values for the respective customer transaction. To do this, call your custom-created transaction and assign the necessary authorization objects either manually by using the Object button, or use the Permissions or System Trace to assign the permissions (see Tip 40, "Using the Permissions Trace to Determine Custom Permissions Proposal Values"). You must leave the authorization objects used in the customer's own coding. For each authorization object, you can maintain field values that appear as suggestion values in the respective roles. Now all the roles concerned must be adapted. If the mixing mode for the transaction PFCG is set to On (see tip 38, "Use transactions SU22 and SU24 correctly"), all PFCG roles assigned to the transaction in the role menu will be recognised and can be remixed via the transaction SUPC. If the customer's transaction is not yet in the PFCG rolls, it will be added here and the respective PFCG role will be remixed.
If you get into the situation that authorizations are required that were not considered in the role concept, "Shortcut for SAP systems" allows you to assign the complete authorization for the respective authorization object.
Double-clicking on a authorization object will direct you to the authorization object definition, and double-clicking on the transaction will direct you to the programme location where the permission check is performed.
This way, not only the user, at what time, what transaction, but also the user, which function block was called.