Hi Sunil,

Yes, this is possible and the steps are quite simple. The nice thing about your question is that it gives me an opportunity to talk about two confusing vocabulary words that have an impact on many everyday FI/CO tasks, including the need of people such as yourself to change the financial statement version on a moment’s notice.

When you receive the error message, Client 100 has status ‘not modifiable’ (Figure 1), you might easily assume that the cause is due to the client settings that disallow customizing in your production system. However, this client-level setting can be ignored for certain customizing activities based on “message control” and the “current settings” indicator.

Figure 1

Long text of error message

Message control enables you to change the outcome of certain system messages. For instance, it is possible to change an individual message from a hard error to a more lenient warning. This can be very beneficial if your business process requires more flexibility than what the standard R/3 system allows.

“Current settings,” a little-known indicator, controls whether or not a customizing activity¹ can be maintained directly in a production system. If this indicator is active for the correct customizing activity, you should be able to maintain your financial statement version directly in your production system without having to transport the change requests from development.

SAP R/3 is delivered with several customizing activities that have the “current settings” indicator already active. Most of these transactions can be found for each module under the Environment>Current Settings application menu. They include maintaining financial postings periods, currency exchange rates, asset period controls, interest rates, and certain worklists used in account analysis.

This functionality is beneficial since most companies have a thorough (and sometimes cumbersome) process for handling change requests. Usually, the changes are first recorded in development, transported to a QA system where they are tested against a stable amount of data, and, barring any failures, transported to production. While it’s a good idea to enforce this methodical procedure for configuration changes, it doesn’t make sense for an item that is largely dependent on master data (such as the financial statement version) and that therefore might change frequently. After all, certain customizing activities (such as exchange rates or FI posting periods) need to be changed on a regular basis. Managing them via the normal Change and Transport System (CTS) would take too long.

If you follow the three steps below, you should be able to manage your financial statement version directly in your production system as you currently do for some of the previously listed items.

The Role of the Message Control Function

First, let’s review how the situation arises in a production system. If you are maintaining a G/L account (Figure 2) and press the Edit financial statement version button, you’ll receive the hard error message you saw in Figure 1. This is a common error message whenever you try to access a screen in a production system that SAP has classified as a customizing activity.

Figure 2

G/L account screen

To change the outcome of this customizing activity, you first need to maintain the message control for this message. Several areas within the IMG allow you to manipulate message control. However, each IMG customizing activity only lets you access a specific work area such as Master data maintenance: customer and vendor or Distributed FI application messages. Therefore, the easiest way to change message control for almost all work areas in FI/CO is via transaction code OBA5.

Once you enter this transaction code, you’ll see a dialog window that prompts you for the application area that you want to work on. Since there are more than 50 different application areas, the simplest way to know which one to work with is through the message number that you received when you were trying to maintain the financial statement version. The first two characters tell you which message class the message belongs to. Most of the time, the message class correlates to the application area. Since your error message was FE146, enter FE (Figure 3) as the Application area and press Enter.

Figure 3

Determining the work area

At the next screen, create a new entry similar to the one shown in Figure 4. For most application areas, you can manipulate the values in the Online and Batch fields to change the message into a warning or an error, or to deactivate the message completely.

Figure 4

Tailoring messages to specific users

However, different application areas have slightly different options. For application area FE, you can specify that the message be treated as follows: E (Error); I (Note in the window); S (Note in the screen footer); - (Switch off the message).

You’ll have to choose the option that best meets your requirements. For this example, I’ve chosen to deactivate the message completely by entering a minus (-) sign in the Online and Batch fields. This means that the message will be deactivated whether it is encountered directly by a user online or via a batch input process.

You’ll also notice that I’ve specified my user ID (NGENEZ) in the User name field. By using the User name field, you can tailor the treatment of certain messages to specific users. Since User name is a key field in this table, you can maintain multiple entries for the same message, and each user will receive different results. My recommendation is to use only the user ID of your FI “power user” or whoever is in charge of maintaining G/L accounts and the financial statement version. This way, all other users will still receive the standard message treatment (an error in this case).

At this point, you have changed how certain users receive the message. Now you need to specify that the customizing activity Define financial statement versions can be directly maintained in a system that does not normally allow changes. Before you do that, however, you need to confirm a key setting for the production client.

The Role of the Client Settings

The FI/CO community usually does not maintain client-level settings. For this step, though, you need to verify only a particular field value, because if the settings are not correct, step 3 will not work. To do so, follow the SAP Easy Access menu path Tools> Administration>Administration> Client Administration>Client Maintenance, or use transaction code SCC4. Then double-click on the appropriate client number to arrive at the screen shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

Change view screen

For a production system, the Changes and transports for client-specific objects field will most likely be set to No changes allowed. If this is the case, then the Client role field must be set to Production and not another value such as Demo or Test. This is important because only in a system that is designated as a production system can you exclude certain customizing settings from the client locks or transport requirements that are indicated in the Changes and transports for client-specific objects area.

If you don’t see similar settings in your system, contact someone on your technical support team.

The Role of the IMG Customizing Activity

The final step is to maintain the customizing activity so that it can be maintained in a production system. Go to the SAP Reference IMG and follow the menu path Financial Accounting> General Ledger Accounting>Business Transactions>Closing>Documenting> Define Financial Statement Versions. Select the IMG activity Define Financial Statement Versions by clicking on the text description. Then go to the menu path Edit>Display IMG Activity.

At the resulting screen (Figure 6), click on the Maint. objects tab and double-click on the specified Customizing object V_T011.

Figure 6

Changing the customizing object screen

You should now be looking at the screen in Figure 7, which shows some basic attributes of the customizing object V_T011. Press the Display> Change button to enter change mode.

Figure 7

Activating the Current settings checkbox

The second step is to activate the Current settings indicator. This indicator is what allows you to maintain a particular configuration object in spite of the No changes allowed setting in the client definition that you saw in Step 2.

After you have saved the change, you can back out to the main SAP menu and access the same IMG menu path or use transaction code OB58. You can also go to the G/L maintenance screen shown in Figure 2 and press the Edit financial statement version button. Either way, you should now be able to maintain the financial statement version in your production system. I have already added the G/L account 100000 to version Z100, and as you can see in Figure 8, I received the preferred message, Financial statement version Z100 saved..., when I pressed the Save button, even though the production system is set up to not allow customizing changes.

Figure 1

Selecting Generated objects

When carrying out these changes, keep the following in mind:

• Since you are now allowing direct maintenance of a customizing activity within your production system, it would be meaningless to transport the same customizing activity up from your development system since its data will not be as current. If you were to transport this customizing activity from development, it would overlay the more current (and most likely more accurate) information in production. To avoid this scenario, you’ll have to deactivate the transport link for these customizing activities. See the sidebar, “Maintaining Current Settings in a Development or Test System.”

• Any changes that you make to this customizing object in your production system will not be recorded in a change request. If you need to move this information to another system (such as a training environment), you must create a manual transport directly at transaction code SE09 or SE10.

Maintaining Current Settings in a Development or Test System
To make sure that any changes to the financial statement versions (customizing object V_T011) are not included in a change request and transported into production by mistake, follow these steps.

From the SAP Easy Access screen, navigate through menu path Tools>ABAP Workbench>Development>Other Tools>General Table Maintenance Dialog or use transaction code SE54 to arrive at the General Table Maintenance dialog screen (Figure 1.) Enter the customizing object V_T011 in the Table/View field, select Generated objects, and press the Change button.

At the next screen (Figure 2), activate the no, or user, recording routine field and save your changes. At this point, the customizing object V_T011 is no longer subject to the transport connection and is excluded from the changeability check that it would normally go through in your development or test system. Note that this is a client-independent change.

Figure 2

Selecting a recording routine

Figure 8

Long text of message received after making the changes in steps 1 through 3