Symptom
- Time entries were mistakenly entered into an incorrectly created project.
- These time entries were later corrected and reassigned to the appropriate project.
- The reversal of the timesheet changes did not process correctly through the system.
- This resulted in deferred costs and service expenses being stuck.
- There are no unposted source documents or Customer Project Expense Lists (CPEL) to be cleared for the affected company.
- The "Not Invoiced Time and Expenses" screen does not show any time or expenses waiting to be assigned.
Environment
SAP Business ByDesign
Reproducing the Issue
- Go to the Business Analytics Work Center.
- Go to the Design Reports view
- Select the G/L accounts - Line items report
- Enter the details like Company, Set of Books, Posting Date and G/L Account in the Data Selection.
- Change the report view to "Deferred Costs - Project View".
- Click on Apply.
You can see a Deferred Cost amount in the Balance Company Currency field for the Project AAA(AAA refers to the Project ID).
Navigate to the Sales Document – Line Item Report from the navigation target to see the Associated Source Document IDs that is causing the deferred costs.
Cause
When checking the document flow of Project AAA, you can observe that there is one PIR (Project Invoice Request Document) with an "In Preparation" status. It can be noticed that even though there is no quantity to be invoiced for some expenses, quantities were manually entered, which were then considered as Deferred quantities.
Additionally, this Project Invoice Request document is inconsistent and contains some validation errors, such as:
- "Customer Invoicing not possible; posting to financial accounting is blocked on xxx" (xxx refers to the accounting period/year).
- "Status of project task AAA is not 'Started', 'Released', or 'Completed'.
Furthermore, employees associated with the project and PIR have canceled time confirmations.
You can check this by following these steps:
- In the Project Management work center, go to the Time and Expenses view.
- Search for the Project AAA.
- You will observe that the Time Confirmation is canceled on dd.mm.yyyy for the employees.
The Project Invoice Request with deferred quantity due to the cancellation of the time confirmation for the respective source document is causing an issue on the accounting side. These deferred expenses were included/assigned in the Project Invoice Request document as Deferred quantities.
This issue occurs because the Project Invoice Request was created first, and later, the employees associated with that Project and PIR canceled their time confirmations. At this point, no messages were triggered from Customer Project Invoice Preparation to Cost Object Expense Account Notification because these time confirmation expenses were already assigned in the existing PIR document. Hence, these expenses are shown as deferred costs in the G/L Account Line Items report and the Project Invoice Request.
Resolution
To resolve this issue, kindly delete the inconsistent PIR document.
The deletion of the PIR will trigger a message to Finance, and the canceled time confirmation source ID will be reversed/canceled.
After reversing the source document of CPEL on the Finance side, no deferred costs will be shown in the report.
Keywords
Deferred Costs, G/L Account Line Items report, Project, Project Invoice Request, Time Confirmation, Employees, CPEL , KBA , SRD-FIN-GL , General Ledger , How To