Dunning 

Purpose

Sometimes your business partners may fall behind on payments. You can send them a payment reminder or a dunning notice to remind them of their outstanding debts.

The SAP System allows you to dun business partners automatically. The system duns the open items from business partner accounts in which the overdue items create a debit balance. The dunning program selects the overdue open items, determines the dunning level of the account in question, and creates a dunning notice. It then saves the dunning data determined for the items and accounts affected.

You can use the dunning program to dun both customers and vendors. It may be necessary to dun a vendor if he or she has a debit balance as a result of a credit memo. If a customer is also a vendor, you can offset the account balances against one another.

 

Dunning is also used in the Real Estate components.

●    For more information about Real Estate (RE), see Dunning Procedure for Rental Agreement

●    For more information about Flexible Real Estate (RE-FX), see Dunning.

Implementation Considerations

If you wish to use the automatic dunning procedure, you have to make settings in the following places before using the system and while it is operational:

●    In Customizing for Financial Accounting (IMG)

●    In the master data for your customers or vendors

●    When you post documents

See also Settings for Dunning:  Overview

Once you have decided in which countries you wish to use the automatic dunning procedure, adjust your settings to meet the country-specific business requirements. In the USA, for example, debtors are not usually dunned. In Customizing, you can make company code-specific settings so that the fields for dunning are hidden for the company code USA.

You use the following attributes to control the dunning program, and you can configure them according to the needs of your company:

●    Dunning procedure
The dunning procedure controls how dunning is carried out by the system. You can define as many dunning procedures as you like.

●    Dunning level
The dunning levels are calculated based on the number of days open items are in arrears. You can also have the system calculate the dunning levels based on the dunning amount or a percentage paid (sales-related dunning level determination).
You can determine more than one dunning level per dunning procedure.

●    Dunning areas
A dunning area is an organizational unit within a company code used for the dunning process.
A dunning area can be a division or a sales organization. You assign a dunning area to an open item when you are posting. You can dun items separately by dunning area.

Features

The SAP System allows you to use either the automatic dunning program, which duns all overdue items in accordance with your selection criteria, or, if required, you can dun individual customers or vendors (see Individual Dunning Notices).

 You have the following options and functions for dunning:

Payment deadline, interest on arrears, and dunning charges	You can enter a specific payment deadline in the dunning notice, as well as interest on arrears and dunning charges (both calculated by the dunning program).
Dunning currency	If all the open items in an account have been posted in the same currency - either local currency or a foreign currency, the dunning program uses this currency. Otherwise, the dunning program uses the local currency of the company code. The items are displayed in document currency in the dunning notice, and the totals in local and foreign currency.
Cross-company code dunning	You can combine the overdue items for one customer or vendor from several company codes in one dunning run, and issue the items in one dunning notice.
Dunning for head office/branch relationships	If your customer or vendor has both a head office and branch offices, dunning notices are sent to the head office. However, you can also send dunning notices to the branch offices.
Dunning one-time accounts	You can dun a one-time account just like any other business partner account. All the items for a one-time account that have the same address are grouped into one dunning notice. Whilst the dunning date and dunning level are written to both the account master record and to the item itself, the dunning interval is determined solely by what is written to the item, not the account master record.
Dunning history	The dunning history provides you with information on all of the dunning runs you have executed and the dunning notices you have sent (overdue items, dunning totals, and so on). If required, you can also select by account type, company code, and/or customer or vendor.

For more information about the special functions in the automatic dunning program see Special Functions in Dunning.