Agency Business (LO-AB) (SAP Library

Agency Business (LO-AB)

Purpose

You can use this component to process transactions between third parties (such as brokers, payment agencies). You can offer the parties involved advantages or services (such as del credere guaranties, easier payment), and perform settlement accounting for commissions in the system.

In pooled payment, the agency negotiates purchase price conditions and payment processing between the vendor and customer, for example. The agency takes a commission from the customer and/or the vendor for services rendered. Transactions relating to the actual merchandise (purchase orders, deliveries, etc.) can be carried out completely independently of the agency. For payment transactions and the calculation of commission, the agency enters incoming invoices and remuneration settlements in agency documents.

Agency documents have the following common features:

There may be no reference in the system to any other documents.
Payments have to be settled on particular dates.
There is direct contact between the customer and the vendor.

With the Agency Business component, you can enter documents without referring to preceding transactions. This means that you can perform settlement accounting for payments and commission even if the system does not contain any master data or movement data for the articles concerned.

Incoming Invoices

You can enter invoices from vendors, credit memos, and so on, either as single settlement requests or in the form of a settlement request list.

Remuneration Settlement

You can enter all ad hoc remunerations or charges made to the vendor in the form of a vendor billing document.

You can then create follow-on documents from these agency documents to perform settlement accounting for the invoices, credit memos, and commission.

Implementation Considerations

The Agency Business component is a part of the SAP System and can be used in all business transactions, independent of the line of business.

Integration

The vendor and customer master and conditions must be in use if you want to use Agency Business.

The following requirements must be met regarding Retail components:

Component	Function
Vendor master	Company-code-specific data, such as address, bank details, terms of payment, partner functions etc., is created for vendors (mandatory).
Customer master	Company-code-specific data, such as address, bank details, terms of payment, partner functions etc., is created for customers (mandatory).
Conditions	Condition records, for example discounts and charges, are entered.
Article master	Article-specific data is created for vendor billing documents (mandatory). Article-specific data is created for payment (optional).
Site master	Site-specific data is created for payment and vendor billing documents (optional).

The following requirements must be met regarding other SAP components:

Component	Function
Financial Accounting	G/L accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and bank accounting for processing accounting documents in payment runs, open items lists, etc.
Logistics Information System	Implementation of standard analyses.
Subsequent Settlement	Conditions that are to be settled for the business partner are entered. The vendor billing document from Subsequent Settlement is used.
Archiving	Archiving of Agency Documents
Profitability Analysis (Controlling)	Incomes, rebates, etc. are transferred to Profitability Analysis in the form of profitability analysis documents.
Actual Costing/Material Ledger (Controlling)
Profit Center Accounting (Enterprise Controlling)	Determination of internal operating profit and other controlling key figures pertaining to profit centers.
Cash management (Treasury)	Documents that have not yet been forwarded to Accounting are transferred to Cash Management to ensure that funds are made available in time for payment of business partners.
Cash budget management (Treasury)	Control of cash flow in view of liquidity
Credit/Risk Management (FI)	Debit-side credit limit check for payment.

The section Functional Prerequisites for Agency Business describes the settings you need to make to use Agency Business correctly.

Features

Entry of inbound invoices without reference to preceding transactions using the documents single settlement request and settlement request list/posting list.

For further information, see Single Settlement Request, Settlement Request List and Posting List.

Entry of remuneration settlements without reference to preceding transactions using the vendor billing document.

For further information, see Vendor Billing Document.

Automatic determination of accounting-related data such as terms of payment and cash discounts when documents are entered.

Use of article-specific data.

Use of site-specific data.

Integrated calculation schema for determining prices and conditions.

Settlement of commission with business partners using the document remuneration list.

For further information, see Remuneration List.

Creation of accounting documents that are forwarded to Financial Accounting.

Output of agency documents in the form of lists.

The lists are particularly useful when you are searching for documents, as you can go from the list directly to the document. For further information, see List Output for Agency Documents.

Option of going to Subsequent Settlement to define conditions that are to be settled retrospectively with business partners.

For further information, see: Subsequent Settlement.