Lesson 4 of 5
Data responsibility
8 min
Every SAP user is also a data steward, whether or not that word is in their job title. The documents you create post to the ledger, the master data you change drives every process that uses it, and the personal data you can see is protected by law. This lesson covers what you are responsible for and how SAP records it.
Who owns what
Master data has owners. At Contoso, the master data team owns business partners and products; finance owns G/L accounts and cost centers; purchasing owns purchasing info records and source lists. Owners decide the rules: who may create, which fields are mandatory, who approves changes. As a user you may be allowed to change some fields, but that does not make you the owner.
| Data | Typical owner at Contoso | What a business user should do |
|---|---|---|
| Business partner (customer Great Lakes Fleet Services, supplier Lakeside Components) | Master data team | Request changes with evidence (for example the supplier's letter for a bank change) |
| Product CMC-ALT-100 | Master data team with plant and costing input | Report wrong data; do not "work around" it in each order |
| G/L accounts, cost centers, profit centers | Finance (Dan's team) | Use the accounts as designed; ask before posting to unusual accounts |
| Prices and conditions | Sales or purchasing management | Do not override prices manually unless your process allows it |
| Your transactions (orders, invoices, postings) | You, the creator | Check before saving; correct through the official reversal or change process |
Change documents: SAP remembers
For most master data and many documents, SAP writes a change document whenever a field changes: who changed it, when, the old value and the new value. You can see this history from the object itself. In the BP transaction, the change history is available from the menu for the business partner. For products, transaction MM04 displays change documents; for sales orders, the change history is under the Environment menu in VA03. Many Fiori object pages offer a similar change log or history section.
Change documents matter for three reasons. Auditors use them to prove that sensitive fields such as bank accounts and credit limits changed only through the approved process. Support teams use them to explain why a process suddenly behaved differently ("the payment terms on the customer changed on Tuesday"). And testers use them as evidence that a master data change was made correctly in the test system.
Personal data and privacy
Business partners include people: contact persons at customers, sole-trader suppliers, employees who are also paid as suppliers for travel expenses. Data protection laws such as the EU GDPR and many US state privacy laws restrict how that personal data is used, who can see it and how long it is kept. SAP S/4HANA supports this with features such as blocking business partners whose business purpose has ended (so ordinary users can no longer see or use them while legal retention still applies), deletion through SAP Information Lifecycle Management once retention ends, and read access logging for sensitive fields.
Your obligations as a user are simpler. Use personal data only for the task in front of you. Do not export lists of contacts to personal files. Do not paste personal data into tickets, chat or email when a business partner number would do. And never copy production personal data into a test spreadsheet "to make the test realistic".
What would you do?
A Contoso clerk notices that Great Lakes Fleet Services' payment terms changed from 30 to 60 days last week, and nobody in sales knows why. What is the best first step?
- Master data has owners; users request changes through the owner's process.
- Change documents record who changed which field, when, with old and new values.
- Read the change history before raising a defect about sudden process behavior.
- Personal data in business partners is protected: use it only for the task, and do not copy it out of SAP.
- In testing, a change document is evidence that a master data change was made correctly.
Check your understanding · not graded
Lesson check
1. What does a change document record?
2. Order pricing changed suddenly. What should you check before raising a defect?
3. Which is an appropriate use of customer contact personal data?
4. What happens to a business partner whose business purpose has ended but whose data must be retained by law?