The tasks in Foreign Trade's Documentary Payments component provide automated support to the creation and maintenance of financial documents. The Cockpit for Documentary Payments is designed to provide you with a simple, easy-to-use overview screen to access to functions associated with Documentary Payments.

You can access most functions associated with Documentary Payments directly from the Cockpit for Documentary Payments. To go to the cockpit from the SAP main menu, choose Logistics ® Sales and distribution (or Materials management) ® Foreign Trade/Customs ® Payment guarantee ® Cockpit - Documentary Payments.

Before utilizing the functions for Documentary Payments, you need to set up the corresponding configuration tables in Customizing. From the Customizing menu, choose Sales and Distribution ® Foreign Trade/Customs ® Documentary Payments and make the appropriate settings in the relevant topics.

The Cockpit for Documentary Payments is divided into the following sections:

These are described in more detail below.

On the initial screen of the cockpit, there is an additional area that you can fill with a picture or text. You can include the standard picture or a text in this screen from Customizing or by choosing Environment ® Maintain user data from the initial screen. The standard picture is SD_FT_LOC_START. You can create a standard text for display in this section by choosing Tools ® Form print ® SAPscript ® Standard text from the SAP standard menu.

In this section of the cockpit, you can create, modify or display financial documents.

With this function you can display several financial documents and change them without exiting from the transaction. You can limit the quantity of financial documents to be displayed based on the following criteria:

• Financial document category
• Financial document type
• Financial document number

You can save these selection parameters for each user as a variant. You can set the maximum number of financial documents that can be listed by choosing Environment ® Maintain user data. If you make no entries to limit the output, the system defaults to a maximum of 500 financial documents.

In this section, you can display the following lists:

• Financial documents currently in the system
• Blocked documents
• Sales documents assigned to the financial documents

You can select variants associated with these lists and execute the reports directly from the cockpit screen without first going to the data selection screen. If you leave the Variant field empty, the system goes to the data selection screen of the corresponding report.

In this section, two functions are available:

• Consistency checks of Foreign Trade data in customer master records

• Print monitoring

This function selects all invoices and documents assigned to a financial document.

This function simulates the assignment of financial documents to sales documents.

In this section, you can

• Display, maintain and create bank master records

• Display, maintain and view a historical log of credit master records.

You can check whether your Customizing settings are correctly maintained in this section.

You can configure the initial screen of the cockpit to match the specific tasks of each individual user. When you exit from the cockpit, the system automatically saves the user- specific parameters (variants, radio buttons, etc.) that were last set, so that when you return, the same conditions exist that appeared before.