Stop Assigning Assets to Locked Cost Centers!

SAP has quite a history in the fixed assets area of how an asset is assigned and integrated to a cost center. Obviously, we don’t want to assign an asset to a cost center that is locked since that will have downstream implications.  You won’t be able to carry out basic asset postings and the month-end depreciation run will error out as well.  It’s the depreciation posting process where this small issue could end up being painful given the typical pressures of month-end close.

Some History on the Depreciation Posting Program

With the old version of the depreciation posting program RABUCH00 in R/3, the subledger would just prepare an FI entry and hand it off to a BDC session.  The user then went to SM35 and processed the session.  If there were errors, they had to handle them one-by-one.  It could be the GL account was locked, a validation of some sort was throwing an error, or maybe even the posting period was already closed.  But the most common error was the cost center being posted to was locked.

Quick story… I had a past customer that had tons of assets assigned to locked cost centers.  Every month-end close, they would process the depreciation BDC session and deal with the errors one-by-one, changing the cost center on the FI line item to the correct unblocked cost center.  They did this manually every single month.  It took more persuasion than I would have thought necessary but I was able to get them to update the cost center on the asset directly so that they wouldn’t have to do this tedious job. </end>

Finding Locked Cost Centers (and Orders)

Finding out about locked cost assignment during month-end close isn’t a good solution.  So what did SAP do?  Quite a bit actually.  They released a CO workflow that would trigger an even to analyze assigned assets when someone locked the cost center at KS02.  The workflow was triggered if the [Actual Primary] lock indicator was activated and then saved.

SAP also released a similar workflow on the asset side.  If the cost center was changed at AS02 on the asset master (or when one was initially assigned at AS01), a check was made to see if the cost center was active or not.  This was also handled via workflow.

Another option back in R/3 was via program RAANALYZE01.  This program was a preimptive way to identify assets assigned to locked cost centers or internal orders.  The idea was to run this prior to running depreciation so that you could either unlock the cost center or reassign the assets accordingly.  Here is how it looked:

After entering in some simple selection criteria, the following ALV pop-up window would appear.

And then the details of the CO error KI260.

The only issue with this was that it wasn’t on the report tree and had no dedicated transaction code so few customers were aware of it.

Changes in R/3 Enterprise and S/4HANA

When SAP developed the final R/3 release (4.7), they re-coded the depreciation program.  RABUCH00 was replaced by an entirely new program called RAPOST2000.  This was a big technical change though the basics from the user side were unchanged.  SAP switched the program to directly post to the GL so there was no BDC session to deal with (good!).  But without the BDC, you had to immediately deal with any errors at AFAB before it would post (also good!).  SAP also incorporated a check against the assets’s assigned cost objects (which was now extended to include WBS elements) to see if they were locked or not.  This occurred both in test and update modes which meant that RAANALYZE01 was no longer necessary. 

As of S/4HANA, RAPOST2000 was again replaced by a new program so the RAANALYZE01 program was officially deprecated and no longer delivered.  The new program still checks if the cost object is locked or not.

At this point, we’re pretty much covered how the handling of locked cost centers are handled at month-end with the depreciation program.  But can we still assign one to the asset?  Are we informed about it’s status in a meaningful way or will we not know until we run depreciation?

Well, it depends. 

Simple Change in Workflow

There is a workflow in FI-AA that analyzes the entered cost center to see if it is locked or not.  But for some reason, it’s delivered inactive.  To me, this should always be activated if only to inform the user that they’ve possibly made the wrong assignment on the asset.  Here’s how to activate it.

Go to transaction OOCU and navigate down to the FI-AA-AA section.  Click on the hyperlink [Activate event linkage].

At the next window, scroll down to WS 20000323 “FI-AA cost center lock”.  Expand it and click on the [Details] button for even BUS0012 CHANGED.  Note in this screenshot that it is currently deactivated.

At the pop-up window, activate the [Event linkage activated] parameter and then press [Save]..

When you’re returned to the list of events, note that BUS0012 shows up as Activated.

Now when I create an asset (or change it) and assign a locked cost center, I’ll get a warning at the bottom of the screen.

It’s the same KI260 error that I showed earlier.

Again, I don’t know why this isn’t delivered active but it’s on my list of items to review when I’m working in a new system.