Process documentationInvoicing Processes

 

Based on billing information, invoicing creates invoices and posts them directly in Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FI-CA).

Prerequisites

You activated invoicing in Customizing for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable under Start of the navigation path Basic Functions Next navigation step Postings and Documents Next navigation step Basic Settings Next navigation step Maintain Central Settings for Posting End of the navigation path.

You have entered the master data of the business partners and contract accounts to be invoiced.

Process

The invoicing processes cover the processes of invoicing that create invoices and integrate billing documents in FI-CA. They map the business transaction that processes the billing documents, creates the invoice, and posts the invoice synchronously. They perform the following tasks:

  • Billing documents from different billing systems are selected, grouped, and displayed together on one invoice. (See Transferring Billing Documents and Billing Documents.)

  • Billing documents are transferred to postings documents in FI-CA synchronously. The invoice display of the tax amounts can influence the tax to be posted.

  • Invoicing documents are created. These save the information for the invoice and are the basis for the physical invoice printing.

  • Simultaneously, correspondence containers are created for invoice printing, and additional data is updated for providing data to Business Information Warehouse (BW) (See also Update to SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW).)

  • Current information for the customer account, such as open invoice receivables, can be displayed on the invoice.

  • You can integrate further FI-CA business transactions in the invoicing processes such that the customer can be informed of changes to the customer account with the invoice. For invoice creation and posting, invoicing uses FI-CA functions. For example, in an invoicing run, you can change the contract accounts of the customers processed by the run. The invoicing run can clear open items of an invoice with credit memo items of a contract account.

Invoicing orders must exist in order for an invoicing process to be started.

Invoicing orders are created when a billing document is created and are used for specific selection of the billing documents not yet processed by an invoicing process. If the invoicing of a billing document is successful, the related invoicing order is deleted.

In addition to billing documents that arise in the SAP system from the transfer of billing documents from external systems or from billing, SD billing documents from the component Sales and Distribution and collective bills from FI-CA can also be understood as invoiceable billing documents. Special invoicing processes can process these source documents. (See also Collective Invoicing.)

Using scheduling, you can generate additional source documents. These enable periodic invoicing, independently of the existence of further source documents to be billed.

Parallel processing of the dataset is always possible. The invoicing processes use the function of the mass activity in FI-CA to split the dataset and distribute processing to different processes in order to reduce the processing time.