Lesson Overview
At the conclusion of this lesson, you will be able to understand the basic concept of convergent invoicing in contract accounts receivable and payable.
Business Example
Print Service Corporation wants usage charges to be invoiced together with printer repair services. SD invoices that represent printer repairs are invoiced together with billing documents that include billable items for print services. Internet sales are invoiced separately, but some business customers also want invoicing lists, to gain an overview of order management in their subsidiaries. Print Service Corporation implements three invoicing processes to cover the different business requirements. These include the following:
One invoicing process to summarize SD invoices together with a billing document.
One invoicing process to invoice internet sales separately.
One to produce an invoicing list for Internet sales business customers.
Invoicing Overview
Convergent invoicing creates invoices by:
Including structured billing information from billing documents for one or more services (such as Telco, data) that were generated in convergent invoicing.
Including structured billing information from SD invoice documents.
Including additional information from contract accounts receivable and payable (FI-CA), such as a dunning charge that was posted, or late payment charges, credits, or interest.
Including historical items (such as open items from previous invoices, payments made since the last invoice run) from contract accounts receivable and payable.
Executing various invoicing functions, such as controlling the invoice amount limit as a function of clarification.
Applying discounts, for example, individual customer discounts that are available at contract account level.
Preparing the printing of invoices and creating print documents.
Creating posting documents in FI-CA. These documents can also be processed by invoicing as part of clearing control, for example, clearing payments on account with receivables from invoicing.
Hint
In the standard system, pricing or re-rating rules are not applied, and there are no transactions on individual events (such as calls). The invoice process has similar steps as the billing process.
Process flow for invoicing from a technical perspective where invoicing is performed in the following steps:
Data selection
During data selection, the system selects the invoicing orders for the invoicing process. You define the data selection criteria for the invoicing process.
Creation of invoicing units
The system groups the selected invoicing orders into invoicing units for each contract account. You can create several invoicing units for each contract account. For each invoicing unit, invoicing in contract accounts receivable and payable creates one invoicing document.
You define the criteria for creating the invoicing units for the invoicing process.
Processing of billing documents
The system includes the selected billing documents for an invoicing unit in the invoicing document. The billing document items are linked with the items of the invoicing document, and the derivations required for the posting in contract accounts receivable and payable are performed.
Execution of additional functions
In addition to processing billing documents, you can integrate further functions of contract accounts receivable and payable in invoicing. These include, for example, interest calculation, the creation of dunning proposals, or the calculation of charges and discounts. You define which additional functions are performed for each invoicing process.
Account maintenance
Using the account maintenance integrated in invoicing in contract accounts receivable and payable, you can perform clearing between the posting documents entered in invoicing and the open items of the contract account posted before invoicing. You define the criteria for clearing in the clearing control.
Update
The system writes the invoicing documents created for the invoicing unit and the posting documents to the database, and deletes the processed invoicing orders.
Print preparation
Along with the invoicing unit, a correspondence container for invoice printing and an extraction order for the update to BW are created.
Convergent invoicing is built to create invoices including structured billing information from multiple billing streams.
This billing information can be provided either by FI-CA-based billing, SD billing, CRM billing, or by integrating external billing systems.
SD billing: You create SD billing documents from the SAP Sales and Distribution component, for example, for hardware sales.
CRM billing: You create invoices or credit notes out of the SAP CRM system, for example, for hardware sales or credits notes triggered by SAP Dispute Management.
One-off charges can be forwarded using billable items as the input channel.
In addition, the accounts receivable sub-ledger can be integrated using FI-CA capabilities as well as FI-CA data (such as payment information or open item information) during the invoicing process.
When updating the accounts receivables sub-ledger, the general ledger and CO accounting are updated simultaneously.
In SAP Easy Access menu, choose Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Invoicing.
The figure shows the invoicing transactions.
To prepare the invoicing process, go to the SAP Easy Access menu and choose Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Invoicing Documents.
Invoicing process preparation
You can analyze invoicing orders from the SAP Easy Access menu by choosing Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Invoicing Documents (transaction FKKINV_MON). You can process invoicing orders directly in the output list of the program.
The invoicing orders can also be shown by using the SAP Fiori appDisplay Invoicing Requests in section Invoicing.
The invoicing order is the trigger for invoicing. An invoicing order is a temporary entry in table DFKKINV_TRIG that represents a source document to be invoiced. It is used to select the source documents to be invoiced and is deleted once the source document has been successfully processed in invoicing.
The invoicing order is created if the following happens:
A billing document is created for invoicing (document type INVBI)
Individual invoices of a collective bill are created (document type COLBI)
An SD billing request for integration in convergent invoicing is created (document type SD)
The user starts the invoicing transactions required with this invoicing process, specifying the selection conditions.
The invoicing report determines the contract accounts for which invoicing is to be carried out. It does this by reading the selection specifications of the invoicing trigger DFKKINV_TRIG with the source document types that are appropriate for the invoicing process and that can trigger invoicing.
You can use the Analyze Invoicing Orders report to select invoicing orders for invoicing. The program can be started as an update run or a simulation.
You can process the invoicing orders selected by the system as follows:
Invoice one or more invoicing orders.
Select one or more invoicing orders for the same contract account and invoice them.
Invoice invoicing orders for a specific contract account.
Performing Invoicing
With the transaction INVOICING IN CONTRACT ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE AND PAYABLE (INDIVIDUAL CREATION), you can create an invoicing document for individual business partners or for a contract account.
The function is also available as a parallel mass run for large numbers of business partners or contract accounts to be invoiced.
Procedure
Individual Invoicing: Update Run
To perform individual invoicing, go to the SAP Easy Access menu and choose Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Invoicing Documents → Create (transaction FKKINV_S).
The corresponding SAP Fiori app Execute Invoicing Business Partner you find in the SAP Fiori launchpad in section Invoicing.
Enter an invoicing process and the required contract partner or contract account. If you specify an invoicing process that also handles collective bills, the system prompts you in a dialog box to enter a due period (Due By).
Run the program.
On the following screen, select the source documents to be invoiced. To display a document, choose the document number.
Individual Invoicing: Simulation
In the SAP Easy Access menu, choose Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Invoicing Documents → Create (transaction FKKINV_S)..
Enter an invoicing process and the contract partner or contract account.
Set the Simulation Run indicator. By setting the corresponding indicator, you can determine whether the simulation is with or without an invoicing order, and whether the invoicing document is saved.
Run the program.
In the simulation run, individual invoicing only creates simulated invoicing documents, it does not post documents in FI-CA.
If you select Simulation Run and Without Invoicing Order on the initial screen, instead of the selection screen for source documents, a dialog box appears where you can enter source documents and their category.
Expert Mode
If you start individual invoicing in expert mode by choosing Expert Mode instead of Execute, you can use the following processing functions:
After
For
In addition
After you have selected the source documents to be invoiced, you can also group the documents by invoicing unit.
For each invoicing unit, you can activate or deactivate specific invoicing functions.
In addition, you can also invoice source documents before they reach their target date for invoicing.
Mass Invoicing
To create invoicing documents for a large number of business partners or contract accounts in a parallel run, go to the SAP Easy Access menu and choose Accounting → Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Periodic Processing → Invoicing. Similar to individual invoicing, you can also start the parallel run in simulation mode.
The corresponding SAP Fiori app is called Execute Invoicing, you find it in the launchpad within section Invoicing.
By choosing Further Selections in the application toolbar, you can add additional selection criteria. You can also restrict the runtime of the mass run. This has the effect that the run ends if the date and time specified are exceeded. Contract accounts considered up to this point are processed completely. You can process contract accounts that were not processed because the runtime ended by starting the run again.
For mass and parallel processing, a reconciliation key is created automatically and closed after processing is completed. You can define runtime end (time and date) and control the log output. You can suppress success messages.
In the SAP Fiori launchpad go to section Invoicing and choose tile Display Invoicing documents or use transaction FKKINVDOC_DISP in the back-end.
To execute the invoicing process, go to the SAP Fiori launchpad and choose the tile Execute Invoicing Business Partner in section Invoicing.
When you execute invoicing, the system requests an invoicing process. The selected invoicing process defines which category of source document is selected for invoicing.
Invoicing transactions require you to specify the following posting parameters:
Document date
Posting date
Reconciliation key (specification only required for individual run)
An invoicing document consists of the following elements:
Invoicing document header
Invoicing document items
Posting documents
Source documents
Reversal data for the invoicing document
In the SAP Fiori launchpad go to section Invoicing and choose tile Display Invoicing documents or use transaction FKKINVDOC_DISP in the back-end.