FICA

Contracts Accounts Receivable and Payable or FI-CA manages the processes for payment processing, posting and dunning. FI-CA also includes the Enhancement Message Management function more commonly known as EMMA or BPEM (Business Process Exceptions Management).

BPEM/EMMA Cases
Business Process Exception Management Cases (BPEM). The analysis of message from the application log and the generation of BPEM Cases for agents to work the underlying exceptions. BPEM Cases can be created from the messages in the application log or manually in IS-U or CRM. These exception cases typically form the majority of Back Office processing in SAP for Utilities.

Contract Account Locks
Locks can be placed upon a Contract Account for various reasons. These locks can have validity periods and also be deactivated (but the history of them retained). Common locks include preventing outbound or inbound payments being applied to the account. Invoicing locks can be applied to avoid invoicing being produced. Also dunning locks can be placed. The presence of a lock can immediately indicate to the user why a given issue exists.

Collection Agency Items
After dunning has attempted to collect outstanding debt, the debt can be handed over to external collection agencies. This exception type highlights any collection items that have been transferred to collection agencies and are currently outstanding.

Collection Work-Items
Collection work-items can be generated as standard SAP workflow work-items to be routed to agents to perform collection activities. These collection work-items are displayed as exceptions if they are currently outstanding and awaiting either allocation or completion.

Instalment Plans
Instalment plans ensure the receivables are not included in the dunning run. Instead, dunning activities are implemented for the due instalments that have fallen into arrears. This work request type provides the instalment plan information for all active instalment plans on the contract account.

Failed Dunning Proposals
A dunning activity step sometimes fails i.e. one of the activities have tried to run but something has gone wrong and it cannot execute, which then halts any further dunning activities from being triggered. This might happen, for example, if there is a problem with posting a late payment charge, or a connection to CRM or another system has failed. This means the customer would not receive any future dunning reminder letter or communications having a significant impact on the customer and potential lost/revenue to the business. This exception allows agents to see the failed activities and dunning history for the customer. Enabling the agent to fix the issue and continue the dunning process. This will ensure lost/delayed revenue is prevented.