1. SAP® T-Codes to dis­play changes se­lec­tive­ly

There are several SAP® transaction codes which will display changes of certain “business objects” (partner, financial document, etc.) directly. Those are usually related to certain topics and not universally valid.

Here is a list of some examples:

• XK04: Vendor account changes
• XD04: Customer account changes
• FB04: Document changes (Financial documents)
• FD24: Credit Management Changes

Let’s take XK04 (Vendor account changes) for example. You can enter a vendor number as well as additional organizational criteria like company code or purchasing organization. Also it is possible to display only changes which were done to “sensitive” (critical) fields.

When executing the transaction, the first screen displays all „Changed Fields“ for the selected vendor account. There are four additional buttons which allow us to customize the way the information is shown:

• It is possible to switch between a display grouped by the “Changed fields” and listing “All Changes”, which includes the details of every change, including old value and new value
• There are two buttons which allow focusing only on “Entries” or “Deletions”
• Clicking on “Field names” toggles between displaying technical fieldnames versus field descriptions

 

By double-clicking it is possible to display even more details regarding a certain change event, for example old and new value, the user who performed the change and the exact timestamp when this was done.

All transactions listed above look and work similar. Transaction FD24 is the second example. It displays changes related to customer credit management. When starting the transaction, it asks for selection criterias like customer number (mandatory) and credit control area or time range.

The result looks similar to the one before as well. It contains a list of changes in the context of credit limit management. This not only includes changes of the limit itself, but also blocks, risk category, customer group or rating changes.

Double-clicking on such entries works just as before and allows us to dive into the details. For taking the screenshot, I double-clicked on the line „credit limit“ line.

2. SAP® Re­ports to cre­ate a list dis­play of changes

While the way I just described requires a partner number as selection parameter, sometimes a more general approach is necessary. This can be solved for example by calling SAP® reports like S_ALR_87012089 or S_ALR_87012090 for vendors and S_ALR_87012182 or S_ALR_87012183 for customers.

The next screenshot shows report „S_ALR_87012089”. Obviously it can be used for displaying changes for several vendors at once, or even the changes for all vendors, if no selection parameters are filled in (there are no mandatory fields in this screen).

I entered a range of vendor numbers, company codes and purchasing organization and restricted the time range to the years of 2000-2004. The result contains a list of all changes corresponding to the selection parameters which were entered before:

3. Branch­ing to dis­play change in­for­ma­tion us­ing the SAP® menu

The two ways we looked at allow us to display changes for „business objects“ like partners (vendors, customers) or a certain document (financial transaction). But how can we display changes for which no special report or transaction code exists? Maybe option 3 is helpful for you then: A lot of transactions allow to branch from their menu to a list of changes related to what you are currently looking at. Let’s take a purchase order in SAP® for example:

Starting point is to display the purchase order („PO“) as usual, for example using T-Code ME23N. Once the PO is on screen, we can go to the menu under “Environment” select between “Header changes” or “Item changes”.

Selecting the first item by highlighting line 10 and choosing „Item changes“ displays all values which have been altered for this purchase order line.