Understanding Billing Functions

A typical billing scenario is that a company wishes to invoice its customers at the end of each month. During the month, the company has shipped materials to many customers, and now wishes to create the corresponding customer invoices.

On the last day of each month, a Billing Clerk accesses SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and opens the Create Billing Documents app. In this app, it is possible to display a list of all deliveries waiting to be invoiced. The Billing Clerk can review the list and trigger the mass creation of invoices to the respective customers.

Alternatively, the creation of invoices may be performed by a background job which is executed automatically on the last day of the month.

Creation of the invoices (known as Billing Documents in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition) also creates corresponding postings in the Financial Accounting area of the system.

Billing completes the "Sell from Stock" process. It would normally be followed by receipt of the customer's payment. However, payment is logically part of Financial Accounting, not Sales, and hence is included in solution process Accounts Receivable (J59).

This is a simplified description of the process, which also includes many additional optional steps. These are described in detail in the test script.

When a billing document is saved, the system automatically generates all the required documents for accounting. Specifically it performs a debit posting on the customer receivables account and a credit posting on the revenue account. These postings can be seen by viewing the corresponding accounting document (or Journal Entry), which can be accessed directly via the billing document or alternatively via the process flow.

The system can automatically generate additional documents for Financial Accounting, as well as documents for Management Accounting and Profitability Analysis.

Further effects of saving a billing document are:

• The status information is updated in all related sales and outbound delivery documents.
• The customer's credit account is updated (assuming SAP S/4HANA Credit Management is active).
• Analytics functions (such as SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics or SAP BW/4HANA) are updated.

As an alternative to the manual creation of billing documents, you can schedule a background job to create them. As indicated in the figure, Relative Date Selection Concept and Date Functions, this scheduling can use relative date selection functionality to select documents for processing.

A relative date is always defined in relation to the date on which the job is scheduled to run. The system determines relative dates, such as Yesterday (single date) and Previous Month (date range), by using date functions.

• While scheduling a new billing document creation job, go to the Parameters section.
• Use the input help of the Relative Billing Date field to choose the desired date function.
• The job is now set to select all billable SD documents whose billing dates match the specified relative date or relative date range.
• Configure the remaining parameters and settings as needed and choose Schedule to finish.

SAP provides several date functions that reflect commonly understood date concepts.

• Only business users that have the Analytics - Query Design business catalog (SAP_CA_BC_ANA_AQD) assigned to them can access the Manage Date Functions app and use it to create custom date functions. The business role Analytics Specialist (SAP_BR_ANALYTICS_SPECIALIST) contains this business catalog by default.
• If you want to give all business users with the Billing Clerk (SAP_BR_BILLING_CLERK) business role access to the app, a key user can assign the Analytics - Query Design business catalog to the Billing Clerk business role.