Settlement

Purpose

This component allows you to perform settlement for services performed for your company by business partners. The business partners can either be employees of your company or third-party service providers.

You can perform settlement for the following services in Media Sales and Distribution:

  • Home delivery (home delivery settlement)

  • Introductions (commission settlement)

  • Postal shipping (postal charge forecast, specific to Germany)

Note Note

The postal charge forecast is a special case in service settlement. It is used to record the postal charges calculated by the Deutsche Post AG (German postal service) for checking and evaluation.

End of the note.

Purchasing organization

Settlement procedures are always assigned to the purchasing organization determined by the system from the service company's master record. The company code to which the purchasing organization is assigned represents the company legally responsible for purchasing services for your company.

Settlement documents

Settlements result in settlement documents , each of which comprises a document header and settlement items. The services that are to be taken into account in a settlement document are defined in Customizing for the settlement type . You can make your own settings for the settlement functions for each settlement type according to the cancellation settlement type, data transfer, settlement block, pricing procedure, output determination procedure etc.

Data transfer

The settlement documents can be transferred to a downstream system. If the carriers or commission recipients are employees of your company, the data is transferred to a human resources system and otherwise to a financial accounting system.

Integration

Service settlement is based on the following prerequisites:

  • Purchasing data on the service company

Each service provider is an employee of a service company. Depending on the membership status of the service company (owned, co-administered or third-party), settlement can either take place for each service company or – in the case of owned or co-administered service companies – for each employee. Contractual arrangements between a purchasing organization for your company and the service company are recorded in the master data on the service company.

  • Employment relationship

An employment relationship is recorded in the system for each carrier or commission recipient (full-time sales agent) who belongs to an owned or co-administered service company. The employment relationship contains contractual arrangements between the service company and the service provider. Settlement takes place for each employee according to the data from the employment relationship. Employment relationships are not managed in your company's system for third-party service companies.

The following diagram illustrates the connection between the membership status of the service company (SC) and the type of service settlement.

Features

The settlement component of Media Sales and Distribution contains the following functions:

Function

Use

Creation of settlement documents

You can create settlement documents for home delivery or introduction services in dialog or collective processing. Settlement creation takes place based on orders, deliveries or terminations. Condition determination takes place automatically using the SAP condition technique. The system also logs the settlements created.

Editing settlement documents

If the settlement documents have not yet been transferred, you can change price elements and repeat pricing.

Cancellation of settlement documents

You can cancel both individual settlements and all settlements in a collective processing run. If the settlement document has already been transferred to a downstream system, the system transfers a corresponding offsetting posting.

Commission clawback on cancellation

You can partially or fully recall commission amounts that have already been paid but to which the commission recipient is not entitled because an order they obtained was canceled, for example if the order was canceled during the liability period specified for the commission recipient or before the minimum subscription length was reached.

Output of settlement documents

You can print out settlement documents using the SAP output control functions. Corresponding output types must be defined for this purpose in Customizing. You can also send settlements via fax or as an internal mail.

Data transfer to downstream systems

You can use the data transfer functions to transfer settlement documents to Financial Accounting or – for your company's own employees – to Human Resources irrespective of the creation time. Since a time offset is possible, you can edit price elements of settlement documents before data transfer.