Describing Customer Billing

When you create a billing document, data is copied from the sales order and the delivery document to the billing document. Delivery items, as well as order items (for example, services), can be references for the billing document.

The billing document serves several important functions:

• It is the sales and distribution document that helps you to generate invoices.
• It serves as a data source for financial accounting (FI) to help you to monitor and process customer payments.
• Typically, creating a billing document automatically updates the G/L accounts.

The main type of billing document is the invoice. The creation of invoices is often the last step in a sales and distribution process. If you have delivered physical products to the customer, you can create invoices with reference to outbound deliveries. If you have sold services, you can create invoices with reference to sales orders.

The system can combine a number of preceding documents (such as outbound deliveries) in one billing document on the condition that these documents have the same values for some relevant characteristics. Examples of these characteristics include the following:

• Payer
• Billing date
• Destination country

The system can create invoices either online or as a background job to be executed during off-peak hours.

Symona has prepared some information for you, to learn more about the effects of saving a billing document. Start with the interaction below to learn more.

The documents within a sales and distribution process are linked to each other via the document flow. This enables you to access the history and current status of your sales and distribution processes at any time.

You can display the document flow as a list with the linked documents. Depending on the document from which you call up the list, all the relevant preceding and subsequent documents are displayed.

From this list, you can display the relevant documents or call up status overviews for the documents.

This provides a quick overview of the progress of your sales processes at any time and can be used to answer customer questions quickly and reliably.