The FI-LAE (Leasing Accounting Engine) is a fascinating module to support the SAP Leasing Solution (as well as some others like Real Estate).  It is very powerful and can be a very flexible tool if you understand where you can exploit areas of amending functionality with ABAP.

In this case, I'll demonstrate how you can use familiar tools like FI Substitution and user exists to fill in values for FI-LAE Value Ids.

All instructions are based on ECC 6.0.

The first few steps are generic for any Substitution and creating user exits for Substitutions.  The rest will be specific to enabling it for the FI-LAE module.

Creating the Z program to hold your user exists

As recommended by SAP, take a copy of the provided program RGGBS000, e.g. ZGGBS000.

Create your user exit in the Z program

I'll assume that you (or someone) will appreciate all the typical details for creating user exists for substitutions and won't go into all the details here.  A few key points follow:

Add your exit to form get_exit_titles

Add structure FILA_VALSUP to the list of tables in the top data declarations.  This is important because this is the structure that you can append via FI-LAE configuration to pass values into the substitution.  Adding the structure here makes those values available to the user exit as well.

Write your user exit.  In our case, we needed to get a specific implicit rate to PV our Residual Values when evaluating the classification on renewed leases.  This involved creating a Z table where we maintain our rates.

(By the way, this is in unit testing now.  The code has not necessarily been optimized for performance.  I wouldn't normally use a Select * if I didn't really need all the fields.  I'm not a formally trained ABAPer so get someone who really knows what they are doing to write the code!)

Update IMG to use your new Z program instead of the SAP delivered program for substitution exists.

SPRO- Financial Accounting (New) - Special Purpose Ledger - Basic Settings - User Exits - Maintain Client Specific User Exits

Update application area GBLS with your new Z program.

Configure your FI-LAE Substitution

Again, I'm going to assume you already know how to setup substitutions in FI-LAE to fill in value fields.  I won't go into those details.

In the end, your substitution should look something like this when calling the user exit.

I'd admit that FI-LAE calls the substitution engine in an awkward way.  It doesn't really let you specify which value id you are performing the substitution for.  Consequently, in "Prerequisites" it is best to check the value id you are substituting.  This will alleviate risk that a given substitution step will be invoked and overwrite the value of other valueids.

Any other alternatives to filling in value ids using customer developed code?

Sure there are...and that is a topic for a future weblog.  The biggest advantage here is letting SAP do the hard work of passing valueids to your user exit.  Other methods will allow you to use LAE function modules to get the value of valueids to use, but this supports more of the available configuration. 

Conclusion

FI-LAE provides numerous (and sometimes too many) ways of customer customizing and enhancement for value ids and processing logic.  You do need to be cautious in how some of the techniques are applied.  Just like any user exit, you are capable of doing damage since there are no boundaries placed on what you can do from within the ABAP.

Some possible future topics include:

• Invoking SAP Alert Management when LAE postings Error Out
• Creating and using custom Value Determination Methods
• "Next Open Accounting Period" configuration

Your feedback is welcome as well as suggestions for future topics.  I'll see if it is something that we are doing in the course of our implementation and is therefore something that can be blogged about with relatively minimal additional effort.

 Good luck!