Using Price Tables

When you look at the menu File → Create of SAP Convergent Charging, you will not find any entry "Price Table" there. A price table is strictly not a separate table type, but rather a mapping table based on a very specific mapping table class. But let’s first talk about why these tables are important and what they are used for.

SAP Convergent Charging us is usually not used isolated, but rather in an integrated scenario along with SAP Subscription Order Management and SAP Convergent Invoicing. Services to sell to customers and the contracts created when customers sign up to these services are managed across these systems consistently. Before contracts can be created for customers, the products or services must be defined along with their prices. This definition happens in SAP Subscription Order Management.

When prices are maintained for services, for which a recurring fee is charged, these prices are defined in SAP Subscription Order Management and replicated towards SAP Convergent Charging automatically. When a contract is created, SAP Subscription Order Management refers to these prices and displays the price for a contract item on the order form before the contract is created. It does not involve SAP Convergent Charging to do this. The calculation happens in SAP Subscription Order Management. Later, when the contract runs and SAP Convergent Charging must trigger the recurring fees for it, this is done without involving SAP Subscription Order Management.

This means, that price information must be in sync between SAP Subscription Order Management and SAP Convergent Charging at all times when dealing with recurring charges associated to a service. The replication mechanism for prices is only available for recurring fees though. For usage fees, there is no such automatic price replication. Note, that the data is only replicated from SAP Subscription Order Management to SAP Convergent Charging. Any changes to the data in SAP Convergent Charging will NOT be communicated back to SAP Subscription Order Management, but potentially overwritten by subsequent replications. Therefore, changes must be done in SAP Subscription order Management only.

A replication of price information between systems requires a common agreement regarding the information format between the systems involved. Price tables are serving exactly this purpose: They are mapping tables based on a very specific mapping table class, which is predefined by SAP. The corresponding mapping table class, however, is not delivered along with SAP Convergent Charging, but must be manually created by the user in the system.

Let’s look at the mapping table class to set up to use price tables, and benefit from the automatic replication of prices.

All character strings are case-sensitive unless explicitly stated otherwise.

• The name of the mapping table class needs to be "Price Table".
• The name of the tables first input column must be "price.key" and the data type must be set to "String". This column contains a reproducible hash key identifying the entry based on the condition table and table key in SAP Subscription Order Management (generated at runtime when needed)
• The name of the second input column must be "currency" and the data type must be set to "Currency".
• The name of the only output column must be "amount" and its data type must be set to "Number".

Any deviation from these requirements might lead to the replication mechanism to fail!

The figure below shows the mapping table class "Price Table" fulfilling the stated requirements.