A gauge of how much of the General Ledger is keyed by hand instead of posted by automation.
At a glance
Manual journal entries are the ones a person types directly into the GL: FB50 for a general ledger document, FB60 for a vendor invoice posting, and their close relatives. They are necessary for accruals, corrections, and reclassifications, but every manual posting carries higher error risk, higher override risk, and a heavier audit burden than an automated, integration-driven one. This card expresses manual postings as a percentage of all postings over the last 30 days and gauges it against a threshold. A low share is a sign of a healthy, automated finance function. A share above roughly a quarter of all postings is a controls and automation gap that SOX-style auditors flag.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your SAP data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A commerce business running SAP S/4HANA Cloud reviews its manual-posting share over a 30-day window ending 31 May 26. The GL recorded 12,000 journal entries in the period.
Four things to notice:
- The manual share is 16.7%, comfortably under the 25% threshold. Two thousand of twelve thousand postings were hand-keyed. The gauge sits in the healthy band and the Nerve Centre stays quiet. This is the shape you want: the bulk of postings flow from automated SD and MM processes, and manual entries are reserved for the accruals, corrections, and reclassifications that genuinely need a human.
- Crossing 25% is the trigger to investigate, not to panic. If the manual count had been 3,200 (26.7%), the gauge would breach. That does not automatically mean fraud or error; it means a quarter of the ledger now depends on people being right, which is worth understanding. The usual causes are an integration that broke (so staff key entries to compensate), a new process that was never automated, or a one-off close with heavy manual accruals.
- FB50 and FB60 are the two big manual buckets. FB50 is a direct GL document (reclassifications, accruals, corrections) and FB60 is a vendor invoice keyed by hand rather than flowing through logistics invoice verification. A spike in FB60 specifically can mean the procure-to-pay automation is being bypassed, which is a distinct controls concern from a spike in FB50.
- The audit angle is the real cost. Manual postings are where auditors look first for segregation-of-duties breaks, missing approvals, and management override. A persistently high manual share lengthens every audit and raises the control-deficiency risk. It also lengthens the period close, because manual entries are slower to prepare and review. Reading this card alongside the close-timeliness cards shows whether a manual-heavy ledger is also a slow-to-close one.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Manual share is a controls gauge; it gains meaning when read against the automation and close-health cards. Pair it with these.Reconciling against SAP
Where to look in S/4HANA Cloud: The closest native equivalents inside the SAP Fiori launchpad are:Manage Journal Entries / Display Journal Entries filtered by the transaction code or entry origin to isolate FB50 and FB60 documents Post General Journal Entries (the Fiori successor to FB50) and Create Incoming Invoices (the FB60 equivalent) to see what counts as a manual document Journal Entry Analyzer for the share of manual vs automated postings over the period Embedded Analytics: the journal-line query grouped by transaction code / entry origin over the 30-day rangeDirect link template:
https://my{tenant}.s4hana.cloud.sap/sap/bc/ui2/flp#JournalEntry-manage
To reproduce the gauge, run the journal-entry list for the same 30-day posting-date range, count the documents whose transaction or entry origin marks them as hand-keyed (FB50, FB60, and equivalents), and divide by total documents. The result should agree with the card within rounding and any difference in which transaction codes you classify as manual. The key judgement is the boundary: park-and-post manual entries and uploaded spreadsheet journals are usually counted as manual; automated accrual engines and recurring-entry runs usually are not.
Common mistakes when comparing against SAP’s own reports:
- Counting recurring-entry runs as manual. A recurring journal set up once and posted automatically each period is an automated posting even though a person defined it. Counting the runs as manual overstates the share.
- Missing the Fiori-app equivalents of FB50 / FB60. S/4HANA Cloud users post through Post General Journal Entries and Create Incoming Invoices rather than the classic transaction codes. Filtering only on the old codes misses them.
- Counting by value instead of by document count. The gauge is a count share. A few large manual accruals can dominate by value while being a tiny share by count.