Payment Order

An instruction to transfer a determined amount of money between one or more accounts of one or more financial institutions.

You can create payment orders in Payment Engine by importing a file. For more information, see File Handler (FS-PE-FH).

You can also create and change payment orders, import incoming payment orders, export outgoing payment orders, and process and postprocess payment orders manually.

To process payment orders, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Payment Engine Payment Order Management Edit Payment Orders (Expert) (transaction /PE1/PO_EXPERT). For more information, see Edit Payment Orders (Expert).

Furthermore, you can process payment orders in batch using the Poller report. To run this report, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Payment Engine Periodic Processing Processes Execute Processes (transaction /PE1/POLLER).

You can define your own payment order types in Customizing. These settings specify process control characteristics such as the checks that the system must make and the relevant field selection control. For more information, see Enrichment and Validation.

You make these settings in Customizing for Payment Engine under Payment Order Define Payment Order Types .

Structure

A payment order is uniquely defined by the following parameters:

Clearing area
Specifies the legally independent organizational unit where a payment order was created or imported from.
Payment order number
Determined by a number range that is defined in Customizing for Payment Engine under Payment Order Maintain Number Ranges of Payment Order .
Payment order date
The system retrieves the payment order date based on the reconciliation date defined in Payment Engine.

Every payment order comprises information that is stored as attributes and grouped on different tab pages. For more information, see Payment Order and Payment Item Overview.

Integration

A payment order generally comprises different payment items categories: an ordering party item, which represent the ordering party and therefore a payment instruction, and one or more recipient items, that is, the items to which a payment is transferred. For more information, see Payment Item.

Payment orders can represent:

Internal payments
A payment transfer takes places between accounts managed by the same financial institution. The payment order is entered directly in Payment Engine or imported from a file for processing by Payment Engine. The payment is forwarded to an internal account management system.
External payments
A payment is transferred between accounts managed by different financial institutions. The payment order is entered directly in Payment Engine or imported from a file for processing by Payment Engine. The route determines that the payment is external and after processing in Payment Engine, the payment is posted to an internal account as a clearing item and the payment data is sent to an external account management system in an outgoing payment order.

For auditing purposes, certain transactions must always be checked and authorized by at least one other employee. For this purpose, a release function with a connection to the workflow based on the principle of dual, treble, or quadruple control is used. You define these specific settings in Customizing for Payment Engine under Payment Order Release for Payment Order . For more information, see Release Workflow and Release Object ORDER (Payment Order).

Incoming payment orders can comprise one or more ordering party items and one or more recipient items. The account related to an ordering party item and the accounts of the recipient items are generally different.

Example Example

Incoming payment order

One ordering party to many recipients
Salary payment by a company: The ordering party is a company, the recipients are the employees.
One ordering party to one recipient
Simple funds transfer

End of the example.

Incoming payment orders can have several ordering party items for the following reasons:

The file used to import the payment order into Payment Engine contains more than one ordering party item.
During payment processing, an ordering party item is split into several items based on the setting defined in the customer service level agreement (SLA).
The system checks whether the ordering party item for this payment order type is to be split based on the transaction type group of the recipient item or based on the reference account number of the recipient item.

For more information, see Service Level Agreement.

Outgoing payment orders can comprise one ordering party item, one or more recipient items, and one clearing item.

Example Example

Outgoing payment order

Payment items are bundled in a clearing collector. When the clearing collector closes, the system generates an outgoing payment order to which it adds a clearing item. The sum of all payment items is posted to a clearing account and the payment items are forwarded to an external account management system in just one payment order.

End of the example.

The way payment orders are processed in Clearing Processing depends on whether they contain internal payment items or external payment items and whether payment items need to be collected or queued.

For more information, see Routing Control (FS-PE-RP) and Clearing Processing (FS-PE-CP).