Lesson Overview
SAP Convergent Invoicing creates invoices by consolidating multiple billing streams.
In this lesson, we show how to integrate the SAP Sales and Distribution billing stream into convergent invoicing.
Business Example
A company has a rating system for usage-related charges. Hardware components and services are delivered using SAP Sales and Distribution, because material management is covered in SAP Materials Management.
Usage charges for data loads, for example, are processed from SAP Convergent Charging to convergent invoicing.
The company wants to process, post, and print SD billing documents together with usage-related charges in one invoice. Therefor, you have to integrate invoicing with sales and distribution.
This is a business example for convergent invoicing, because the billing stream for service and material from sales and distribution is brought together with the billing stream from rating and charging.
SD Billing
We will now have a brief look at the standard sales and distribution process in SAP Sales and Distribution to understand the preconditions for integration.
SD sales order:
In the SAP Sales and Distribution process, a sales order is entered into the system. The sales order is entered for a sales area. Each order has an order type. In the Sold-to Party field, you enter the customer, and add the purchase order defined by customer, the material that is ordered, and the quantity of the material. Assume that it is a standard material and pricing conditions for material are available.
SD delivery:
The availability of the material is checked with the materials management inventory function. Sales and distribution is closely integrated with materials management and is often used for sales of physical goods such as cell phones.
SD billing document:
The SD billing document is always related to a sales order in sales and distribution. If a delivery is in process, you create a billing document that references the delivery document. If there are service goods without a delivery, the billing document is created with reference to the sales order. If necessary, pricing is updated to the actual billing data.
Accounting:
Releasing the SD billing document to accounting creates the accounting document on the customer account in accounts receivable accounting.
All the created documents are linked using a document flow and can be traced in the document flow of the sales order.
To integrate SAP Sales and Distribution with convergent invoicing, you need common business partner and contract account master data as the foundation. This is explained in the following figure.
General purpose customer vendor integration:
Customer vendor Integration may be required for the business partner if you want to use financial accounting (FI) and SAP Business Partner in parallel.
In financial accounting (FI) for company external accounting, accounts receivable accounting is used as part of accounts receivable (AR) to manage accounting data for all customers. Financial accounting does not rely on the SAP Business Partner to manage the business partners. Instead, it uses its own customer vendor master records. These are integrated in all accounting transactions, such as creating business transactions on accounts and processing posting data.
Consequence of integrating SD billing into contract account invoicing:
To integrate sales and distribution and contract account billing, you need customer integration, because you need customer master data as well as business partner master data.
Processing result:
When processing the business partner, you also update the relevant data for the customer master record and vice versa.
In sales and distribution, the account group is the leading category that determines which characteristics the customer receives. In customizing, the account group is assigned to the FI-CA role MKK. This is necessary for mapping the SD customer and account group to the FI-CA business partner in the role MKK.
When a new customer is created in SD, the system also creates a business partner with the role MKK. This can be used as master data in contract accounts receivable and payable.
You still have to create a contract account to complete master data in contract accounts receivable and payable.
You can make customer/vendor integration settings in customizing for cross-application components by choosing Master Data Synchronization → Customer/Vendor Integration.
For more information, see the documentation for the individual customizing activities.
You activate direct integration in customizing for contract accounts receivable and payable. You do so by specifying for each SD billing type and customer group if further processing should take place in invoicing in contract accounts receivable and payable.
During the transfer of SD billing documents to accounting, the accounting interface identifies FI-CA as the accounting component, but does not create a posting document.
Instead of an FI-CA posting document, the system creates an invoicing order for invoicing in contract accounts receivable and payable with the source document category SD Billing Document (fixed value VBRK).
The invoicing function Invoicing SD Billing Documents VBRK (INV_VBRK_DOC) processes this invoicing order.
As a result of direct integration, you can see all the process steps for convergent invoicing in the document flow for the sales order. These include the following:
- Invoicing order
- Invoicing document
- Accounting documents generated by invoicing document.
- Reversal of invoicing document.
- Accounting reversal
In customizing, choose Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Integration → Sales and Distribution → Define Posting to FI-CA for Customer Account Groups.
For each customer account group, you define whether SD billing documents for these customers should be transferred to accounts receivable (FI-AR) or to contract accounts receivable and payable (FI-CA).
In customizing, choose Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Integration → Sales and Distribution → Define Settings for Transfer to Invoicing (posting area 1205).
Set the indicator for direct integration without sample documents in FI-CA.
In customizing, choose Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Integration → Sales and Distribution → Derive Main/Sub-Transaction from SD Information (posting area 1200).
In this activity, you enter the main transactions and sub-transactions that the system automatically determines from the billing document data when SD billing documents are transferred to contract accounts receivable and payable.
In customizing, choose Financial Accounting → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Integration → Sales and Distribution → Derive Document Type for SD Billing Documents (posting area 1210).
The reference to the SD billing document is made in the invoicing order by means of the Source Document Category = VBRK and Source Document Number = SD Billing Document Number fields.