Billing the Customer

Once the incoming supplier invoice has been entered in the SAP S/4HANA system, the customer is billed. The sales order can be found in the billing due list and is processed automatically with the next collective billing run. The relevant billing date for the billing due list corresponds to the posting date of the supplier invoice. Since an outbound delivery for third-party items does not exist in your system, you need to select the checkbox for order-related billing when selecting the documents to be billed using the billing due list.

In Customizing for item category TAS, if you set the field Billing Relevance to value B (relevant for order-related billing based on the sales order quantity), the system enters the sales order in the billing due list as soon as you save the sales order.

If you set the field Billing Relevance to value F (relevant for order-related billing based on the invoice quantity), the system transfers the order to the billing due list only after the incoming supplier invoice is posted. By default, the Billing Relevance field contains value F for item category TAS (Third Party Item).

For value B, the third-party order item is only set to fully billed when the supplier invoice quantity corresponds to the quantity of the sales order item and this quantity is fully billed to the customer. For value F, a customer billing documented is created for every supplier invoice received individually (in case multiple supplier invoices are received). The sales order is considered to be fully billed up until the next invoice is received from the supplier.

The field Billing Quantity in copying control from sales documents to billing documents contains value F (Invoice receipt quantity minus invoiced quantity) for item category TAS (Third Party Item). This means that the quantity from the supplier invoice is transferred to the billing document (instead of the order quantity) to determine the quantity that needs to be billed to the customer.

An example: a sales order is created for 10 pieces of a certain material (material M-03 is used here). The material is procured using third-party order processing, so a purchase requisition is automatically created when saving the sales order.

The purchase requisition for 10 pieces is converted into a purchase order for 10 pieces, which is sent to the supplier.

Now assume that the supplier is only able to deliver 9 pieces of the material to the customer at this moment. A goods receipt for 9 pieces is entered to confirm the delivery (or receipt) of these 9 pieces at the customer.

The supplier invoice that is entered in the selling company code, also contains just 9 pieces, since this is the quantity that was delivered to the customer.

Based on value F (Invoice receipt quantity minus invoiced quantity) for the field Billing Quantity in copying control from sales documents to billing documents (for item category TAS), the billing document for the customer also contains 9 pieces.

The moving average price calculates the valuation price for a material based on actual procurement costs. It is one way of determining the valuation price for a certain material. Another way would be to use a standard price. Condition type VPRS is used in pricing in Sales in the SAP S/4HANA system to represent the costs for a sold material. It takes its value from this moving average price of the material master record (if this is the way the material is indeed valuated). Condition type VPRS is used when calculating the profit margin for a sales process. In a sales order item, this condition type is used as a statistical value, meaning that it doesn't influence the price that the customer is actually paying for the sold material.

If you have made the relevant settings in Customizing, the moving average price in the case of a third-party item can be calculated based on the value of the vendor invoice plus proportional statistical conditions (such as for example a cash discount) from the purchase order in procurement.

The document flow shows an overview of all related documents for a specific business transaction.

For a third-party sales order, the first follow-up document you can see in the document flow is the purchase order with the third-party item in it. Using the Display Document option for the purchase order, you can check any goods receipt and invoice receipt postings and their values for that purchase order.

The billing document(s) issued to the customer and any related accounting documents are also listed in the document flow.

As a last topic in this unit, the image above shows the account postings that the system executes when creating a customer billing document.