Information on FI-CA (Financials and Contract Accounts)

Submitted by Anil Kumar

The term FI-CA stands for “Contract accounts receivable and payable.“ FI-CA contains the range of functions needed by different industries or projects for their accounts receivable and payable management. Currently, these industries include public sector, utilities and telecommunications companies.
The common factor among these companies is a multitude of customers, which means even more open items. The number of customers in each system may go into the millions, and the number of open items several times that.
Such volumes of data can be processed by FI-CA because the memory space required for storing open and cleared items was reduced and critical activities such as posting, paying, dunning and returns processing were accelerated.

The FI-CA documents provide for the current account assignments from the following application components:

• The general ledger. Here it is the company code, business area, G/L account.
• The overhead costs Controlling and the Profitability Analysis (CO-PA). Here it is cost center, order, project, Profit Center, profitability segment.

The documents update FI-CA posting totals which are subdivided according to the account assignments named above. However, because the FI-CA documents often only differ from each other with regard to amount, business partner and contract account, a large summarization effect arises in the FI-CA posting totals. So experience from IS-U shows that several hundred thousand FI-CA document items meet on a few hundred totals records.
The FI-CA posting totals form the basis for generating G/L documents, via which not only the general ledger, but also, by transferring the corresponding Controlling account assignments, the different areas of Controlling are updated.
In addition to the account assignment characteristics of G/L accounting and Controlling, the FI-CA posting totals can be grouped according to a freely definable reconciliation key.
This reconciliation key is stored:

• in the FI-CA document header
• in the FI-CA posting totals
• in the document header of the general ledger document as external reference

This makes it possible to understand from which FI-CA documents a general ledger transfer document has been formed. This is a way in which, for instance, a reconciliation between contract accounts receivable and payable and the general ledger for a complete payment run, billing run or a given pile of FI-CA documents can be executed.
The FI-CA documents provide for the current account assignments from the following application components:

• The general ledger. Here it is the company code, business area, G/L account.
• The overhead costs Controlling and the Profitability Analysis (CO-PA). Here it is cost center, order, project, Profit Center, profitability segment.

Integration

The documents update FI-CA posting totals which are subdivided according to the account assignments named above. However, because the FI-CA documents often only differ from each other with regard to amount, business partner and contract account, a large summarization effect arises in the FI-CA posting totals. So experience from IS-U shows that several hundred thousand FI-CA document items meet on a few hundred totals records.
The FI-CA posting totals form the basis for generating G/L documents, via which not only the general ledger, but also, by transferring the corresponding Controlling account assignments, the different areas of Controlling are updated.
In addition to the account assignment characteristics of G/L accounting and Controlling, the FI-CA posting totals can be grouped according to a freely definable reconciliation key.
This reconciliation key is stored:

• in the FI-CA document header
• in the FI-CA posting totals
• in the document header of the general ledger document as external reference

This makes it possible to understand from which FI-CA documents a general ledger transfer document has been formed. This is a way in which, for instance, a reconciliation between contract accounts receivable and payable and the general ledger for a complete payment run, billing run or a given pile of FI-CA documents can be executed.

It is thus in a way a subledger of FICO. FI-CA, though not a complete subledger accounting system, it is always a component of an industry solution or a project solution.

FI-CA is first and foremost a component of the following industry solutions:

• Utilities (IS-U)
• Insurance (IS-IS/PP)
• Public sector (IS-PS)
• Tele communication (IS-T)

FI-CA mainly covers the functionality of those areas in which at least two of the industries reveal the same type of requirements. Individual requirements from exactly one industry are to be achieved as an industry solution on the basis of the FI-CA.