Duplicated invoice issue happened

[jihoon_jung]

Dear Experts,

Let me ask you what would be the root cause of duplicated invoice issue.

1. Symptom:

Recently, I found our system had 2 duplicated invoices which have same data except their document number.

   - Their document number are sequential; Billing no#1 with account document#1 & Billing No.2 with account document No2.

   - They even have same posting date & document entry date (Entry & posting date: 26th October for both billing)

     (But their entry time were different from each other, about a minute gap)

  This is abnormal case.

As you know, normally,

once a delivery document is fully invoiced, it can't have any further invoice.

2. Reproduction result:

Currently, I can't reproduce the same symptom due to error message "Delivery doc#xxxx is fully invoiced...".

3. New type of duplicate invoice issue:

And release # of our ERP system is #606.

So, this is not related to notes#217157 which was corrected since release# 4.7

4. Other considerable factor:

And in this situation,

one of my colleague suspects the entry date / posting date of the firstly created invoice(called No1 in the above) is not correct data.

Cause, in the middle of November, there was system down time for monthly-Service maintenance.

And sometimes duplicated invoices can be created

if there's pending invoice data in some kind of SAP-queue which is temporary memory area

(I'm not sure what exactly this mean in technical point of view)

The following is his scenario:

  i)  On 26th October, sales person tried to create the first billing,

      but there was something wrong so that the invoice & its account document had not been stored to DB.

      instead, it had been stored to the Queue of ERP system.(Let's call this 'Billing No1')

  ii) At this moment, the user regarded the first trial was failed

     and there was nothing new in the document flow. So the user retried to create billing and succeed.(Let's call this billing No.2)

     The billing No.2 & its account document had been stored to DB as normal.

  iii)With above operation history,

     our monthly-closing of October had been finished as normal

     (There was no data inconsistency in sales performance report at this moment)

  iv) In the middle of November, our BD did the service maintenance job

       so that the pending invoice No1 & its account document could be created with past-entry&posting date.

  v) In the monthly closing of November,

      the duplicate billing No.1 & its account doc can be found

      both SD-document flow & FI-G/L account balance display(t-code FS10N).

  Do you think the above scenario is possible?

   If so, how could be the billing No.1 inserted to the queue?

  Thnaks in advance...

[vijayakumar_jayaraman]

Hi,

Please check OSS note 12934- Two billing documents exist for one delivery note.

regards,

Vijayakumar

[Former Member]

Thank Vijayakumar. We have reviewed the note. But what we need to find out is what caused this and how to prevent it.

Thanks

Dinali

[jihoon_jung]

Hi Dinali Jayanetti,

   Let me brief my case.

   First, I believe SAP can not help you,

   Unless you re-produce the same symptom.

   In my case, SAP-on site support guy couldn't find anything special

    (Even he scanned all the relevant customer-enhancement logic...)

    And as I mentioned in the former comment,

   if your company also applied inter-company sales process,

    the 'OSS note 12934' is meaningless for this symptom. 

   so called, solution 'ZVINVOIC' is just report program to show you

  all the cases of which document flow has two invoices

  (Even the billings are I/C billing...)

  --> And as you know, monitoring by us is not the real solution, isn't it?

        I believe ,at least, solution should remove the root cause.

        So that customers can be free from the same problem without any additional management done by custom side.

  If your symptom happens only after system-shut down,

    then let me suggest you a kind of monitoring(there's no other way I can find):

    i) By checking 'SM13' DB-update queue after every single system shut-down.

        (This checking should be done by your BC guy...)

    ii)If there's any update-request entry exist,

       BC guy ask the relevant module guy whether they can remove the entry or not.

    I believe this kind of symptom can be happened in all SAP-module, not only SD.

    It's a cross-module symptom I believe it's tightly connected to Update WP in SAP system.

   (Because the same symptom was also found in our another module 'FI' after another shutting down of our system)

B/R

Jihoon Jung

[former_member412213]

Hello Jihoon Jung,

I had the same issue after the implementation of ECC 6.0 EHP7.  Contacting SAP they also recommended the report from the Note 12924. I´ll be glad if you can share updates regarding your approach with the DB queue.

Thanks in advance

Bruno Canuto

[jihoon_jung]

Hi Bruno,

  What I took was same as I mentioned earlier in the above:

  "If your symptom happens only after system-shut down,

    i) After every system-shut down:

       Checking 'SM13' DB-update queue(This should be done by your BC guy...)

    ii)If there's any update-request entry exists,

       BC guy informs the relevant module guy(SD,MM, etc) whether they can remove the entry or not."

   This kind of manual checking is the only solution for my customer.

    And if you have any more question, please feel free~

B/R

Jihoon Jung

[former_member672131]

Hello,

Please find the document flow of both invoices. You can get better idea. If the reference delivery document of both invoice is different then there is no issue. If delivery document of both invoice is same then we can say i.e system inconsistency. You can raise the same case to SAP.

Regards,

Rahul Hande

[jihoon_jung]

Hi Rahul,

Thank you for your advice.

And both invoices can be seen on the same document flow.

In table 'VBFA' of the sales, both invoices are found...

The symptom is just like SAP note#12934.

And I already received support-feedback from SAP via incident case.

But their advice is hard to be accepted.

i) No analyzation to find the root cause how the duplicated invoice data could be put into the DB update queue.

ii) And I tested the suggested solution, report program 'ZVINVOIC'.

     But the result of the report contains all the normal cases like I/C billing & customer billing and even partial shipment cases.

    As you know,

    if the report can't classify the above normal cases from the real duplicated invoice case,

    it's meaningless to use the program to catch just the duplicated invoices.

    (As I analyzed the source of the report program,

     it just prints all the multiple invoices cases of which document document flow have multiple invoices regardless it's normal case or not...)

[jihoon_jung]

Dear Experts,

  If SAP can't give me any effective solution,

  may be, I have to make a better report program copying ZVINVOIC they gave me...

  If I can add some filtering logic into ZVINVOIC,

  the report would delete normal cases from the report-list

  (Nomal case: Inter company sales, partial shipment...these cases normally have multiple invoices, and this is just normal so that the list should not show these kind of case on the list )

B/R

Jihoon Jung

[jihoon_jung]

Dear Experts,

   Let me close this discussion by saying as below.

   Our company decided to complain directly to SAP

   Due to nothing updated about what the root cause is

   & their poor solution 'ZVINVOIC' which is just useless to us

      (Just shows all multiple invoices in the table 'VBFA' even it's I/C billing...)

   In parallel, we decied to develop report program

   which will check all pending data on DB-update Queue without any support from SAP.  

   And the program will be used at every system-down time(Executed by our BC guy)

   I hope you'll never face this kind of issue on SAP,

   But if you also get this kind of issue unfortunately,

   I recommand you not to contact SAP via support-incident.

   It was just time-wasting to me. So, please save your time to make your own solution....

B/R

Jihoon Jung

[Former Member]

Hello Jihoon Jung,

Thank you for you thread. We are also experiencing the same exact issue that you have described on your thread.

We also got the duplicate invoices after our monthly shutdown of SAP. We are on ECC 6.0 EHP7.

We also created a SAP support message and working with SAP, and I am using your thread to convince SAP that we are not the only customer who faces faced this issue.

If it is ok with you, can you please share the z program that you guys created to access pending data on DB-update Queue. We are also reviewing the sd billing report variant SDBILLDL where we have selected Asyn. updates. It is called in mutiple steps of RV60SBAT.

Thank you

Dinali

[jignesh_mehta3]

Hello,

The general behavior of system is once the Number Range is forwarded, that is by any change of Invoice No. 1 is not created and Number Range is skipped, it cannot be reused automatically.

I mean say due to any reason, Number Range 1 is skipped then the next Invoice Number be 2 and later on there is no automatic way to create an Invoice with number 1.

Thus even if Invoice number 1 was in DB queue and created in middle of November, it cannot have number 1 and also accounting document as sequential number range.

This seems to be some other system update error. Probably your Basis consultant would be in a better position to explore this case.

Also is this the only inconsistency or there are such inconsistencies in other modules too?

Thanks,

Jignesh Mehta

[jihoon_jung]

Hi Mehta,

  First, thanks for the advice.

  I totally agree with you. Base on the sequential document number & entry time,

  The billing No.1 should be the only one billing for the delivery.

  But unfortunately,

  FI guys said by end of October, the account document of billing No.2 was the only one they could find via G/L account balance display, 'FS10N'.

  And in case of account document of billing No.1,

  FI guys couldn't find it until November

& currently they can also find the account document on FS10N.

  This is the reason why they thought the billing No1 seems to be created later than Billing No.2

  And for more detail investigation, I'm also co-working with our BC guys.

  But still, we couldn't find out

  how the billings could be created existed just for a single-same delivery document....