Understanding the Process Steps and Business Roles for Scope Item Accounts Receivable (J59)

The above table provides an overview of all the standard business roles that are used when testing and executing scope item Accounts Receivable (J59).

Note

This information is based on the test script for scope item Accounts Receivable (J59), which can be found on and downloaded from the SAP Best Practices Explorer website at http://rapid.sap.com.

These roles can be used as a template to create your own business roles for your business users working with scope item Accounts Receivable (J59).

Nearly all invoices and credit memos from customers reach the accounts receivable component through its integration with the sales order management component. In exceptional cases, if there is no reference to a sales order, invoices, and credit memos can be entered in the accounts receivable subledger. The document entry screen is divided into the following areas:

• Work templates: Here, you can select screen variants, account assignment templates, or held documents as references.

• Header and customer data: Document header and customer line item data is entered here.

• G/L account items: The G/L line items for the document are entered here.

• Information area: The document balance and information about the customer are displayed here. It also contains a link to the master data and open items.

This transaction can also be used to create documents in a foreign currency. The foreign currency amount is translated into local currency using defined exchange rates.

In the figure, Create Outgoing Invoices Application, you can see the application screen for posting invoices and credit memos.

Incoming payments can be dealt with in several ways in different companies (and in cases according to local regulations). Incoming payments are posted as shown in the figure, Incoming Payments. They operate as follows:

• The items are cleared if the customer pays open items in the full amount or with an agreed cash discount.
• If a minor payment difference occurs, this can be charged off automatically. The maximum amount that constitutes a minor payment difference is defined by the tolerance group assigned to the BP and the user.
• Any payment difference outside the tolerance group settings must be dealt with manually.

The two methods of posting payment differences are as follows:

• Partial payment: The item being short-paid does not clear. A new open item in the amount of the payment is created on the credit side. This credit entry shows up right above the open item being paid and it references the open item being short-paid.
• Residual item: The open invoice is cleared and a new open item (residual item) in the amount of the payment difference is created.

All of the elements of the payment transactions are shown in the figure, Elements of the Payment Transaction.

A payment transaction can be carried out either manually or automatically using the payment program.

You can create individual reprocessing rules for G/L account postings during the Bank Statement post-processing. This way, repeatable tasks during Bank Statement post-processing can be put to individual rules and allows faster identification, validation, and clearing of Bank Statement Items.

Automated creation of dispute cases with reprocessing rules is a feature to have the system automatically create dispute cases if a reprocessing rule cannot process your bank statement items. In the Manage Bank Statement Reprocessing Rules app, you can define when and how the system should create a dispute case.

The SAP system provides you with a tool that automatically analyzes all the open items and duns any items that are overdue. The system determines a dunning level, which corresponds to the number of days in arrears. The dunning level determines the dunning charges and interest levied, as well as which dunning text is selected. The dunning history keeps a record of which dunning notices have been issued.

You can trigger automatic dunning for a single account (individual dunning notice), or you can have the dunning program carry out automatic dunning for a selected number of accounts.

Dunning is controlled by the dunning procedure. Most of the settings for dunning are defined by the dunning procedure assigned to a customer. A dunning procedure must be entered in every customer and supplier account that is to be included in automatic dunning.

You can specify how the dunning run is to be executed by entering parameters in the dunning program. You can use the parameters of an existing dunning run as a template and adjust the dates to meet your requirements. Typical parameters are the company codes and accounts that are to be included in the dunning run.

During the dunning run, accounts are selected and checked for overdue items. The system then checks whether dunning notices have to be sent, and assigns the relevant dunning levels. All dunning data is stored in a dunning proposal.

You can edit, delete, and recreate the dunning proposal as often as required to achieve the desired result.

The dunning proposal is not a mandatory step; therefore, it can be omitted. If Dunn.print with scheduling is not selected, the system does not produce a proposal. Instead, it prints the dunning notices as soon as the program has been executed.

In one step, the system prints the dunning notices and updates the dunning data in the master records and documents, including the dunning dates and levels.

In the dunning notice you send to your customers, you can add new custom fields: A header field, a contacts list, and a new column in the item list.

You can print an Open Item List and send for confirmation to your customers.

In this concept, we will look at one of the use cases for the Situations Handling framework, delivered as an enhancement of the SAP Fiori app Manage Payment Advices. The objective of the scenario is to proactively inform you about potentially unpaid Accounts Receivable (AR) invoices.

This scenario addresses a delaying tactic sometimes used by customers when paying supplier invoices, in order to take extended credit from them. When chased for payment by the supplier's AR department, the customer confirms that they will pay – which they do, for example, to ensure deliveries are not stopped. Conveniently, however, they decide to exclude the invoice with the highest amount from the payment. Often, the supplier only discovers this after the payment is received, posted, and allocated, and when the new round of collections activity starts based on a refreshed collections worklist, which still shows the invoice in question as overdue. In many companies, this process can take weeks. This is despite the fact that the customer would have transmitted a remittance advice to the supplier at the time of making the payment, showing that not all invoices are covered, because companies don't have the resources to manually analyze each and every advice received. With the Situations Framework, you can change that and utilize the information contained in the payment advice to notify users instantly upon its receipt, without waiting for the previously mentioned events to take place. You can then contact the customer immediately and demand additional payment much sooner than before, contributing towards more effective working capital management and lower Day Sales Outstanding.

As a collections specialist, you call a customer – Computer Systems Germany – to obtain a payment for eight invoices that should have been paid in August, September and October. Their AP department assures you that a payment will be made the same day, so you conclude the call and move on to the next customer on your daily worklist. Later, they do in fact make the payment, but somehow omit the only invoice you really care about: one for 47,000, only settling the others totaling less than 10,000. Their ERP system automatically generates a payment advice and e-mails it to your AR payments processing team.

When the payment advice is received, your payments processing specialist imports it into the system using the SAP Fiori app Manage Payment Advices. The app is integrated with SAP Cash Application and its Payment Advice Extraction service. You drag and drop the PDF received, and the data contained is automatically processed, using machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR). A draft payment advice is created in the SAP S/4HANA system.

You can review the extracted information, visually comparing it to the image of the payment advices submitted. After you confirm it, the object is saved to the database. In the past, as previously explained, it would then sit and wait there to be used for allocating the payment when it is received, not really utilizing the information actually presented in the payment advice itself.

In the Situation Type, SAP has created backend logic that maps the invoice numbers mentioned on the payment advices to the corresponding open items on the customer's account in receivables. Looking at the due dates of the respective journal entries, you locate the date range covered by the payment. Where other documents exist within the same data range, not included on the advice, a Situation is created. To only flag significant cases, a threshold for the minimal value of the excluded invoices has been defined. The threshold is 50 percent of the value of all invoices within the given date range. This means that if only lower value invoices have been missed, there is no Situation.

There is also a functionality that dynamically derives the notification recipient from master data. Specifically, the business user maintained in the system as the accounting clerk for the particular customer and company code – which would typically be the collections specialist – receives an instant notification informing them about a Situation that requires their attention. Clicking on it takes you to the object page of the Payment Advice in the Manage Payment Advices app.

There, you can now see the generic Situation Message section provided by the framework. You can also see the Related Information facet inserted into the UI specifically for your use case listing the relevant information about any skipped open items within the data range as explained. You can use standard Smart Links to review the journal entry in other SAP Fiori applications, or use the customer Smart Link to navigate back to another app, such as Process Receivables.

You can then either send correspondence to the customer or log a dispute case for the document in question. Whatever action you choose, you have the opportunity to address a common business situation much sooner than before, resulting in better performance for your Accounts Receivable organization.

You can use the following simulations to work your way through the main process steps for scope item J59:

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