SAP FICA Course Introduction

In SAP, Financial Accounting ( SAP-FI) delivers the standard Accounts Receivable (FI-AR) & Accounts Payable (FI-AP) module to track accounts receivable & accounts payable transactions. This module is tightly integrated with the Sales and Distribution (SD) module & Materials Management (MM) MOdule to enter and process customer & Vendor master data, shipping, billing, invoicing and receivables & payables.

The requirements became more complex and the data volume increased substantially over the last couple of decades, SAP developed a module in FI for tracking A/R data. This application component is known as Contract Accounts Receivables and Payables (FI-CA). SAP promotes FICA as a sub-ledger application alternative for the FI-AR module and Accounts Payables module (FI-AP).

FI-CA was developed to deal with a large number of different customers and different types of receivables. FI-CA is mainly used in industry-specific SAP components, which by nature have many customers and many different receivable types.

Industries like public sector, utilities, insurance, and telecommunications follows FICA for accounts management. Even if you do not fall into one of these industry groups, you can still use contract accounting.

The industry solutions for FI-CA have been available since 1999. An industry-neutral version was introduced in 2002. FI-CA is not only tightly integrated with the core SAP components like FI,Controlling (CO), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and SD, it also hasthe capability to deal with customers and payments over the Internet by using SAP Biller Direct, which allows your company to use electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP).

FICA is a cross-application component used in SAP ISU, telecom, insurance, and other applications specified by the industry. These business serve majorly on B2C segment and companies generally have a very large volume of consumer base. Every time we have to make thousands of invoices at a time frequently as per scheduled billing cycles. FICA Module is tightly integrated with below application area .

Various industry sectors use FI-CA as a subledger, due to its seamless integration

in the general ledger or invoicing, as well as in Web-based self services and call center solutions. The exchange of messages in the integration is based largely on the XML interfaces of the SAP Netweaver Exchange infrastructure.

The SAP Switch Framework is available for activating industry solutions that are delivered as business function sets. Industry business function sets (BFS) consist of a number of functions (BF), which can be activated separately.

Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable is a subledger developed for industries with a large customer base and a correspondingly high volume of documents to post, such as utility companies.

This component provides standard accounts receivable and accounts payable functions including dunning, posting documents, and making payments. Contract accounts receivable and payable consists of the following detailed components along with others:

• Basic Functions
• Business Transactions
• Integration
• Closing Operations
• Information System
• Job Controls
• Archiving
• Interfaces
• The EVENT Concept
• Data Processing in Mass Runs
• Enhanced Message Management