Understanding Special Types of Settlement

EBDRs are a billing method that enable you to bill different types of Sales and Distribution (SD) documents in your SAP S/4HANA system, together with billing data from external sources to create combined customer invoices.

Convergent billing describes the process of billing different types of SD documents together to create a single customer invoice. This method is recommended any time that you want to bill a customer for sales orders, deliveries, or professional services simultaneously. In effect, you are converging multiple billing due list items (including different billing types) into a single customer invoice.

A customer purchases a solution-centric offering from an IT company. The solution includes computer hardware (outbound delivery), a software license (sales order), consulting services (debit memo request), and digital machine learning services delivered in the cloud (external usage-based billing data persisted in an EBDR). During the billing process at the end of each month, you converge the relevant billing data from all channels so that you can send out a combined, single invoice that bills the customer according to how much they used each offering component.

The following three remarks all relate to an external billing document request (EBDR):

• The definition of an EBDR is: a request object that persists billing data received from an external system in your SAP S/4HANA system.
• It appears alongside other SD documents in the billing due list (the Create Billing Documents app).
• A dedicated object page displays all of its attributes.

Omnichannel convergent billing further extends this concept. This approach enables you to fill your billing due list (in the Create Billing Documents app) with external billing document requests (EBDRs) that contain billing data from external systems. You can then converge the internal and external billing data into combined customer invoices. This enables you to easily create invoices for solution-centric offerings that combine billable items from different channels (internal and external) and billing categories (for example, one-time billing, project-based billing, and usage-based billing). As a result, the administrative overhead traditionally associated with the combined billing of solution-centric offerings is substantially reduced, along with the number of invoices that you are required to create and send to customers.

The following figure outlines how to create an EBDR using a Microsoft Excel file upload:

Characteristics of this functionality are:

• You use the SAP Fiori app Manage Billing Document Requests.
• You import external billing data into your SAP S/4HANA system in the form of an External Billing Document Request (EBDR).
• You can use a pre-delivered MS Excel template.
• You can use the app Create Billing Documents.

You can import external billing data into your system in the form of External Billing Document Requests (EBDRs). Simply enter your billing data into the per-delivered Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet) template. Once your external billing data is correctly written to the required format (*.XLSX), you can easily and quickly upload the data into the SAP S/4HANA system. Your data is processed and persisted in the form of External Billing Document Requests that appear in the billing due list (App: Create Billing Documents) and in the Manage Billing Document Requests app.

EBDRs are request objects that serve to transform and persist billing data that your SAP S/4HANA system has received from an external source (such as an external SAP system). EBDRs enable you to bill external billing data from different sources. Moreover, you can also converge the billing data (for example, pay-per-use data) with internal billing data (for example, billable items from a delivery). This enables you to bill customers for offerings that combine different billing types through a combined, single invoice.

The worklist in the Create Billing Documents — Billing Due List Items app now lists EBDRs. EBDRs contain billing data from external sources, such as external SAP or non-SAP systems. EBDRs can be billed independently or converged with billable sales and distribution documents (such as deliveries and debit memo requests) to produce combined customer invoices. This process is called omnichannel convergent billing. One major advantage of the omnichannel approach to billing is that it greatly reduces the administrative overhead that is traditionally associated with the combined billing of solution-centric offerings.

To make use of preliminary billing documents in your system, a configuration expert must have activated the business function Functionality for Preliminary Billing Documents (SD_BIL_PRELIMBILLINGDOC) in Customizing. Besides the activation of the business function no further action is necessary.

Before deciding to activate this business function, be aware that after you create a preliminary billing document for a document in the billing due list (for example, a delivery), the billing status of this preceding document changes to indicate that it has been billed. The document is therefore removed from the billing due list, even though no final billing document exists. This mean that you can no longer create a billing document for it directly from the billing due list in the Create Billing Documents app, unless you first reject the preliminary billing document. Rejecting a preliminary billing document reopens the preceding document for billing. To create the final billing document based on the preliminary billing document, you use the creation function in the Manage Preliminary Billing Documents app.

As an optional function for the preliminary billing documents process, SAP offers approval workflows for preliminary billing documents. If you wish, you can implement an approval process for your preliminary billing documents. For further information please refer to the SAP help documentation.