After the shipping process has been completed, Felix from the billing department creates the billing document. This can be done manually, automatically, or in a batch job. The billing document is a data source for financial accounting.
Billing supports:
- Creating invoices for goods and services
- Canceling previously posted billing documents
- Automatically transferring billing document data to accounting
When selling physical products, the billing document is created with reference to one or more outbound deliveries. When selling services, the billing document is created with references to sales orders. In both cases, the relevant information is copied from the preceding documents into the billing document.
The system can combine a number of related documents (such as outbound deliveries or sales orders) in one billing document, providing these documents have the same values for some relevant characteristics, such as the following:
- The payer
- The billing date
- The destination country
The main type of billing document is the invoice (F1 invoice or F2 invoice). The creation of invoices is often the last step in a sales and distribution process. The system can create invoices either online or as a background job to be executed during off-peak hours.
Note
Other types of billing documents, such as credit memos, also exist, but these are not covered here.When Felix saves the billing document, the system automatically generates all the required documents for accounting.
The figure illustrates the effects of a billing document.
The system creates the following postings:
- Postings on the general ledger account.
- Documents for controlling, such as profitability analysis (co-pa).
- Update of sales statistics in SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics or SAP BW/4HANA.
- Update of the customer's credit limit data (if the corresponding function is used).
- Status update of all the related sales, delivery, and billing documents.