Upgrading from SAP S/4 HANA 1610 to 1709 will give you a weird PCA message

Here is how to solve it …..

Recently at a customer, I went through an upgrade from SAP S/4 HANA 1610 to 1709 version and right after the technical upgrade was completed by the Basis team; we started having a weird message about Profit Center Accounting (PCA) not being active.

For those of us that have been around for a while and we have worked in the past with ECC6.0 (and even ECC5.0), we know that ever since the introduction of New GL (back in 2004 for ECC5.0 and ECC6.0 in 2005), SAP has incorporated Profit Center Accounting scenario into FI and that you did not require to have activated anymore Profit Center Accounting on the CO – Controlling side.

With this you would no longer have to run reports out of Ledger 8A in PCA and the old tables GLPCA would no longer be filled. Same as GLT0. All of course in the case you would have activated in a greenfield implementation (or Migrated) New GL.

Now all of a sudden, many versions and years later, I was having a weird error message in SAP after the upgrade to 1709 telling me that PCA was not active. Because of this the system came to a halt and no Financial postings could go through. All in a perfectly healthy system that was running without any issues on 1610 without PCA being active.

As a side note, the environment was coming from an old upgraded ECC6.0 to S/4 HANA 1610 but this client never had Classic GL nor PCA activated before. They were right from the beginning in New GL

There was no mention to something like this in the 1709 Simplification Notes (at least at the time on Oct-2018), no OSS Notes on the subject either.

The error message was FINS_ACDOC_CUST415

If you look at the message, it is a little bit confusing. On one side it says that the scenario is obsolete, that needs to be transparent so you need to activate it; and on the other side it says that Activating Ledger 8A is not mandatory. But without that option activated, your system will still not work. So ?? Make up your mind SAP ??

What was the solution then ??

So the solution was to activate PCA Posting in Tcodee 0KE5 and save. But this SAVE, does not trigger a transport, this Tcode does not do it.

Then you would trigger a transport with Tcode 0KEP and move it across your landscape.

After, the posting problem was solved and the old PCA Tables where not getting posted. (Ex. GLPCA), our error gone and the system back to normal.

If your Company and/or Project needs to implement this, or any of the functionalities described in my Blog, or advise about them, do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will be happy to provide you my services.

www.dnabusinessconsulting.com