SAP FI-CA (Contract Accounting Accounts Receivables and Payables)

SAP FI-CA (Contract Accounting Accounts Receivables and Payables)

1. Functionality of FI-CA.
2. Difference between FI-CA vs FI-AR.
3. How FI-CA will replace FI-AR ? 
4. Advantages of FI-CA.
5. How FI-CA will suit for public sector ?
6. Cost benefits of using FI-CA.

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 Receivable and Payable (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. 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 has
the 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).

        One of the weak points of FI-CA is its limited reporting functionality because of huge size of data. For reporting, SAP customers who use the FI-CA module also have Business Information Warehouse (BW) installed. 

        FI-CA incorporates more A/R functions than just processing invoices and payments and maintaining master data. These functions are necessary if you deal with a large customer base and a high volume of invoices and payments. This is the case with a utility, insurance, or telecommunications company or in the public sector.