Subscriber Account and External Account

A potential customer interested in your services contacts your company. The customer wants to sign up for a service. The first step necessary is to record your customers data in your ERP system, so that you legally know whom you are dealing with. This data is an important basis for a contract between your company and your new customer. Let’s have a look at the data you need to record.

Let's first have a look at the end-to-end process again. Master data management is the first step of the end-to-end process. It forms the basis of any subsequent step as it creates the following entities:

1. The Subscriber Account
2. The External Account
3. Provider Contracts
4. Access Objects
5. Partner Provider Contracts

To keep things simple, this lesson focuses on subscriber accounts and external accounts.

A subscriber account represents a customer. However, for reasons like parallelization and scaling a customer can be associated with more than one subscriber account. This course does not go into those details yet. Just keep in mind that while most of the time there is probably a one-to-one relationship between a customer and a subscriber account, it might as well be a one-to-many relationship.

Since SAP Convergent Charging does not need to know a lot about a customer, the data associated with a subscriber account is rather limited. The following data is part of the subscriber account in SAP Convergent Charging:

General information

• Subscriber account name
• Subscriber
• The Service provider the subscriber account belongs to
• Customer management area

Tax information

• Taxation Type
• Taxation Mode

External account to charge by default

The following figure shows the subscriber as it is displayed in the Core Tool.

The most important information is the subscriber account name. It is usually populated with the identifier of your subscriber account. In the context of Billing Revenue and Innovation Management (BRIM), this identifier is usually provided by SAP Subscription Order Management (SOM).

SAP Convergent Charging does support use by multiple service providers, and thus multiple catalogs. In an integrated BRIM scenario, however, only one such catalog is supported. As a result, the association of a subscriber account to a catalog is not significant. Nonetheless, each subscriber account must be associated with exactly one service provider.

Customer management areas allow SAP Convergent Charging to be used with more than one couple of CI / SOM systems. Each customer management area is associated with exactly one set of CI / SOM systems, so that during communication between all systems, each master data entity can clearly be connected to a specific CI / SOM instance.

SAP Convergent Charging is supporting tax calculation. In the context of SAP BRIM usually only the taxation type is set, which has to be compatible to the taxation framework of the SAP Convergent Charging installation. The taxation mode and value added tax section will not be used. The end-to-end processes rely on the more advanced taxation functionality provided by SAP S/4HANA Convergent Invoicing.

If no external account is explicitly addressed during a charge operation, you can (but do not have to) choose a default account that is charged. External accounts are covered next, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard about them yet. Usually, no setting needs to be made here, as the charging is normally set up in a way that explicitly addresses one external account to be charged.

The subscriber account shows three more tabs, which list entities associated with this subscriber account:

• Contracts
• Mapping Tables
• Range Tables

This training has not yet explained any of these object types, but don’t worry, all this will be covered later. For now, just remember that there is a list available for each subscriber account that shows all these objects belonging to the chosen subscriber account.

External accounts are sub elements of subscriber accounts. This means:

• Every external account belongs to exactly one subscriber account.
• There is no external account without a subscriber account.

The external account is again mainly a reference to an account managed outside of SAP Convergent Charging. In the context of BRIM, this account is the contract account in SAP S/4HANA.

Although a subscriber account can technically exist without an external account, the external account is essential when you want to charge for a service. Any fee charged must be charged against a specific external account.

As you can see in the figure, very little data is stored in SAP Convergent Charging for the external account (or contract account in SAP S/4HANA terms).

The most important information is the name of the external account itself, which in SAP BRIM matches the ID of the associated contract account in SAP Convergent Invoicing.

The external account code, however, does not contain the ID of the external account (as you might have expected), but does contain the ID of the subscriber account this external account belongs to. This has technical reasons, and therefore is not covered in this course. Just be aware of it.

Besides external accounts, SAP Convergent Charging also manages prepaid accounts. These will not be covered in this course.

So far, you think of subscriber accounts as customers, but this is a rather simplified approach. Let’s delve a bit deeper.

When a new customer is created in SAP SOM, it is created as a so called "business partner". This is a more general term for any entity that plays a role in your business. These roles can be:

• "Customers" you want to deliver tangible goods to (important for logistics processes).
• "Suppliers" you buy from.
• "Contract Partners" you want to have subscribe to you services (this is what you are interested in).
• And more…

Only those business partners are replicated as subscriber accounts to SAP Convergent Charging that are associated with the role Contract Partner (the ID of that role is MKK)

Business Partners assigned to other roles will be handled by other parts of SAP SAP S/4HANA, like Sales Billing, Financials, and so on.