Down Payments for Sales Orders 

Purpose

Normally, down payment agreements are made for producing and delivering goods to customers in the capital goods, or plant engineering and construction industries.

Down payments are payments made before completion of the product, with no interest. They represent short or medium term outside capital procurement and therefore improve the company’s liquidity situation.

Features

Down Payment Agreements in the Sales Order

Down payments form part of the agreement with the customer and are saved in the sales order.

A down payment agreement is created as a deadline in the billing plan. This enables you to agree on as many down payments as required for different dates. The date for the down payment request yet to be created is specified in the deadline, and the system uses payment conditions to assign a due date to the down payment.

The value of the agreed down payment can either be created as an amount or percentage value of the item.

If a down payment agreement is assigned to one item with a billing plan, the down payment agreement is contained as a deadline in this billing plan.

Down Payment Request

A down payment request is sent to the customer in time for the deadline. The request can be generated by the system from the billing due list, or you can enter it manually. The down payment request is automatically posted as such to Financial Accounting.

You can see the created down payment requests in the document flow for the sales order.

Incoming Payments for a Down Payment Request

When you post an incoming down payment, the system proposes and assigns the available down payment requests.

Partial or Final Invoice with Down Payment Clearing

In partial invoices and for the final invoice, the down payments that have been made are copied to the billing document as down payments for clearing. The value of the down payments for clearing is displayed in the customer invoice.

In the partial invoice or final invoice, you can change the down payment amounts for clearing.

The down payments for clearing that have been assigned to a billing document cause the system to clear all the completed down payments against the receivables in Financial Accounting.

 

Cancellation is possible not only for the down payment request but also for an invoice with down payment clearing.

 

Constraints

Down payments in sales orders can only be used with the billing plan. Down payments cannot be cleared for delivery-related billing documents.