Payment Card Processing in Accounting
Purpose
With this function, you can manage the processing of business processes that do not involve cash with payment cards. For this purpose, your employees get payment cards which they can use to complete the purchases for their organization. The individual accounting transactions (card transactions) are first checked, registered and paid by the associated credit card institute (clearing center). The clearing center then delivers an inbound file containing all data records as a collective invoice of the individual payment transactions, to data carriers at periodic intervals.
Payment card processing in Accounting offers the following functions:
- Importing the inbound file of the payment card institute into the SAP system
- Posting and payment of the collective invoice
- Assignment or change to the account assignment, approval and posting of individual card transactions
- Entering a credit voucher in
Earmarked Funds
Prerequisites
The features of the payment card process are delivered with role SAP_FI_AP_PCARD. If you want to use the function in your organization, assign this role to the respective employees.
A correct process flow of the payment card processing is given as soon as the required settings are executed in Customizing. You must also create payment card master records and define the authorization profiles for employees.
For more information, see:
Customizing for Payment Card Processing
Maintain Authorizations for Payment Card Processing
Payment Card Master Record
Process Flow
An employee makes a purchase for the organization using a payment card. In addition to the cash receipt, the vendor/dealer issues him with a document for the payment card transaction. This document data registers the purchase with the credit card institute.
The purchase can be represented in the system as a business transaction. This transaction is not absolutely necessary, but offers the option of reserving the purchase amount as earmarked funds. For more information, see Credit Vouchers.
The payment card institute sends a collective invoice for data carriers (inbound file) to the organization. This inbound file contains the purchase data of all card transactions of a particular time period (e.g. monthly period).
You read the inbound file into the system and save this as a payment card file.
The system carries out a check on the inbound file before saving. For additional information, see:
Import Inbound File and Generate Payment Card File
You generate accounting documents from the payment card file. Depending on the data record quantity, batch processing can be used here. During document generation, the system automatically writes a log file, in which the result of the attempted posting is saved for each data record.
With document generation, the parameters for the payment card master record control whether a card transaction is posted as an actual document or a parked document with/without Workflow.
As well as the data records of individual card transactions, the data record of a main card is also defined in a payment card file. The total of purchases is posted as vendor invoice using this main card data record. The account assignment specified in the main card master record is applied here.
You check the log file and correct unsuccessful attempted postings. For this, you select according to those data records, from which no documents were generated. After correcting the error, you execute these postings again. For more information, see Log File.
Parked documents are either delivered automatically to the Workflow inbox of selected users or can be found manually with standard tools. Only selected employees are allowed to process parked documents and process them as actual accounting documents. The settings and authorizations for this are saved in the Payment Card Master Record
Payment Card Processing in Accounting