Service Management – Define Accounting Indicators

This lesson is far more subjective in terms of importance.  Why do I say that?  well, this field can be completely useless, somewhat important all the way up to vital.  You might be saying, really Mike?  Let me explain myself.  The accounting indicator by itself does absolutely nothing.  It’s just a value that can be assigned to a service order.  The true power of the value comes from how (or even if) you choose to use it.  The accounting indicator is often a big component in RRB (Resource related billing) and will potentially drive different materials, different prices, or even ignore things altogether from being passed to the billing document.  Or, the value could simply be used in reporting to measure the amount of warranty, good-will, free of charge service.  It all depends on your needs.

I personally, think this is a great field and should be utilized to the utmost.  Of course, not every service organization needs this functionality.  The biggest problem is that this field is a manual entry on a service order.  Often the service technicians have no idea who’s paying for this repair, and likely don’t care because it’s their job to fix it.  Other organizations may empower their service department the ability to define if it’s warranty or not.  But it still comes down to someone manually populating the field (and more importantly, remember to do so). 

So, philosophical part is over.  🙂   On to the show.

Here’s where to find the menu path.

And as you can see, it doesn’t get any easier.  When you press new entries, give it a value and a description.  That’s it.  The real work is in determining how many and for what purpose you need them.  Common uses include:

Good- Will (we really like this customer, so to keep their business we’ll do this for free)

Warranty (it’s within our warranty period, so we’ll eat the cost)

Extended Warranty (they purchased a plan, now we need to honor it).

General/Standard – customer will pay for it.

You can set up anything that fits your business, but these are some of the common ones I’ve seen.  I’d love to hear from you if you’ve seen other common values, or uses for the accounting indicator.

If you’re interested in great tips and tricks on SAP service management, variant configuration or ABAP Development, check out my blog at: http://paperstreetenterprises.com/blog/

There is also a link to some SAP Easy Buttons =)

Thanks for reading,

Mike

CTO – JaveLLin Solutions, LLC