Sams Teach Yourself SAP R/3 in 10 Minutes

Kinds of Business Documents

In very general terms, there are two kinds of data in any system:

• Master data—This data is relatively fixed in your system. Your company could continue to run for days without creating new master data. Not all master data has the word master in its name. Customer Master, Personnel Master, and Chart of Accounts are all examples of master data. (These are discussed in more detail in Lesson 15, "Using Master Data.")

• Transaction data— This data is made up of the normal day-to-day business transactions in a system. If you couldn't create these documents, your business would come to a stop. Purchase orders, invoices, and production orders are all examples of transaction data. With transaction data, there's usually a chain ...