Background of Accounting Indicator Feature

In Service, Accounting Indicator determines the final price of a product by considering the discount rate. The types of discounts can be Goodwill, VIP Discount, Family Discount, etc. With Accounting Indicator, you can also calculate incurred costs and profits.

Why Do You Need an Exclusive Accounting Indicator in Service Transactions?

Currently, service orders and service confirmations have ‘S1’ (Non-Billable Demand) as a standard option for customers. Service transactions won’t be able to use ‘S1’ as it’s deprecated from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 onwards. This is because of 2 reasons:

• The current value of ‘S1’ doesn’t influence billing.
• Customers can now flexibly use more than one value for Accounting Indicator.

If you’re a customer…

• using service transactions in SAP S/4HANA Cloud (service order, service confirmation, etc.), you won’t be able to use ‘S1’ as it’ll be deprecated.
• you can’t delete the value ‘S2’. This is because a new configuration app is provided in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 (Define Accounting Indicators for Service) that’ll have a value ‘S2’ (Goodwill) as a new standard Accounting Indicator for cloud customers. You can only change or delete the values you’ve created.
• and you change the value of ‘S1’ to anything else, you won’t be able to undo the change. This is because existing service transactions using ‘S1’ will be allowed to complete their lifecycle with the same value to avoid inconsistencies.

Feature Toggle for Accounting Indicator

The improvement of Accounting Indicator will be delivered in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 with a feature toggle of type Deferred Adoption.

Deferred Adoption enables customers to adopt new functions selectively (opt-in) at their own pace. If there are changes to the existing functions, the customer can decide when to start using a new feature in an SAP-defined timeframe. The new feature then becomes the one by default.

New Feature Toggle ID: CRMS4_SRVC_ACCOUNTING_IND

Default Value: ‘OFF’

Standard user: BPC_EXPERT

App Activate New Features (see figure 1) is available under the tab Feature Management.

Figure 1 – App Activate New Features (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

You can filter with above noted ID and activate the feature toggle (see figure 2).

Figure 2 – Overview of Features (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

When the feature toggle is OFF, service transactions can still use ‘S1’. When ON, ‘S1’ won’t be visible, except for existing service transactions with ‘S1’.

New Configuration App for Accounting Indicator

A new configuration app (see Figure 3) is available that has ‘S2’ as a standard value for Accounting Indicator (see figure 4), where customers can change or delete the values they create.

Figure 3 – SSCUI Accounting Indicators (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Figure 4 – List of accounting indicators (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

In figure 5 you can see an example how the condition type for accounting indicator (DAI2) can be maintained for various Accounting Indicators configured by customers.

Figure 5 – Example Condition Type DAI2 (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

How to Duplicate the Condition Master Data from Accounting Indicator ‘S1’ to ‘S2’?

• Logon to the Fiori UI as PRICING_SPECIALIST
• Use the app Manage Prices – Sales (see figure 6)

Figure 6 – App Manage Prices (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

• Enter the condition type DAI2 and accounting indicator ‘S1’ in the Search tab (see figure 7).

Figure 7 – Overview of maintained condition records (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

• All condition records with accounting indicator ‘S1’ for the given key combination is displayed (see figure 7). Select either ‘Export’ or ‘Export (including description)’. The search result list is saved in an excel sheet in the selected location.
• Copy the downloaded excel to a new excel file and change the accounting indicator from ‘S1’ to ‘S2’ (or any other custom value as available in configuration app). Change the condition record ID to value $$001, etc. and save your changes.
• Go back to the Fiori UI and choose Import. In the popup window, select the new excel which you had created, and choose ‘Import’ (see figure 8). If the import fails (for example, if the key value you used is invalid), an error message is displayed to explain what should be done to import the file again.

Figure 8 – Import window (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Use Cases for Accounting Indicator (UI)

With feature toggle ON

Scenario 1: Create a new service order. Here, ‘S1’ isn’t available for selection (see figure 9).

Figure 9 – Create Service Order window with feature toggle ON (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Scenario 2: Create a service confirmation for a service order which didn’t have ‘S1’ in any of its line items before the feature toggle came into effect. Here, ‘S1’ can’t be selected for any of the line items in the service confirmation (see figure 10).

Figure 10 – Create Service Confirmation window (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Scenario 3: Service Order with an existing Accounting Indicator ‘S1’, added before the feature toggle was introduced (see figure 11). When a service confirmation is created, ‘S1’ will be copied to complete the end-to-end life cycle of the service transaction.

Figure 11 – Service Order with ‘S1’ (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

With feature toggle OFF

Scenario 1: Create a new service order. ‘S1’ is available for selection apart from other configured values in the configuration app (see figure 12).

Figure 12 – Create Service Order window with feature toggle OFF (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Scenario 2: Create a service confirmation for a service order which didn’t have ‘S1’ in any of its line items before the feature toggle came into effect. Here, ‘S1’ can be selected for any of the line items in the service confirmation.

Figure 13 – Create Service Confirmation window with feature toggle OFF (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Scenario 3: Service order with existing Accounting Indicator ‘S1’ added before the feature toggle was introduced (see figure 14). When a service confirmation is created, ‘S1’ will be copied to complete the end-to-end life cycle of the transaction.

Figure 14 – Service Order with ‘S1’ (screenshot from SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208)

Behavior of Accounting Indicator in ODATA and SOAP APIs

The SOAP and OData APIs for service orders and service confirmations currently support the Accounting Indicator through field/node BillableControl. The behavior of Accounting Indicator with the external APIs mirrors the UIs.

Acceptance or rejection of ‘S1’ is based on the following:

• Feature toggle
• If a service order already has an existing value for ‘S1’ prior to the toggle being available

Conclusion

Hopefully after reading this blog post, you will have more in-depth knowledge about the improvement of Accounting Indicator in service order process.

Please don’t hesitate to raise your questions in Q&A forum of SAP Community or leave your comments below!

For more details about Feature Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, please visit the full product assistance documentation in the SAP Help Portal:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/b249d650b15e4b3d9fc2077ee921abd0/LATEST/en-US/0b6ffcd340d640e0a5b5cbd7d9edc0a9.html