Integration of the Down Payment Chain in Purchasing

If you have assigned the item category Service to an order item in the purchase order and the Customizing activity Assign Chain Type to Purchase Order Document is configured accordingly, a contract for the credit-side down payment chain is created or changed for this order item. In credit-side down payment chains, the contract can be settled as follows:

Advance payment, several partial invoices taking account of retention amounts and service charges, a final invoice, and adjustments after the final invoice. The following features are available:

For more information, see SAP Library under Debit-Side and Credit-Side Down Payment Chains.

Integration of the Debit-Side Down Payment Chain in the Sales Process within the Sales Order Item

If you create or change a sales order, the system checks if a chain type of a debit-side down payment chain has been assigned to the selected item category of a sales document item.

Customer Enhancements

You can use the Business Add-In (BAdI) Posting the Down Payment Chain to design your own subscreen for posting a new down payment chain transaction.

The Business Add-In (BAdI) Customer-Specific Tab Pages in Contracts allows you to develop your own tab pages in down payment chain contracts.

For more information about the Business Add-Ins, see the Customizing section Enhance Debit-Side and Credit-Side Down Payment Chains under Define Customer Enhancements.

Account Assignment Objects

You can make an account assignment for the contract of a debit-side or credit-side down payment chain to WBS elements, a cost center, a network/activity, or an order. When you integrate debit-side down payment chains in the sales process, you can use the WBS element and the order as account assignment objects.

Advance Payment

Advance payments are used for advance financing. If you post partial invoices as invoices, you can enter advance payments up until you enter a final invoice. Advance payments can be cleared with the following partial invoice completely, partially, or not at all. Retention amounts and additional costs are not taken into account in advance payments. Advance payments only affect payments, not revenues. You post an advance payment entirely to an account assignment object (for example, a WBS element).

Retention Amounts

In the down payment chain contract, you can agree on the following retention amounts with your business partner:

You can consider the following retentions in the down payment chain transactions:

When advance payment requests are created, no retention amounts are considered.

If you enter partial invoices as down payment requests, the retention amounts are posted statistically to the down payment chain. The accounting document shows the open receivable or payable.

If you enter partial invoices as invoices, final invoices, or adjustments/corrections, the security retention amounts and special retention amounts are:

You define the special G/L indicator in Customizing either based on the company code or based on the company code and the retention category for debit-side and credit-side down payment chains.

The special G/L indicator determines the reconciliation accounts of the general ledger to which the system updates the retention amounts (security retention amounts and special retention amounts). You define the payment block in Customizing based on the company code for debit-side and credit-side down payment chains for partial invoices and final invoices. In Customizing, you can still configure the net amount or gross amount as the base amount for the percentage calculation of the security retention amounts.

Additional Costs

In the down payment chain contract, you can enter additional costs or contractors' all risk insurance that you agreed on with your business partner. For contractors' all risk (CAR) insurance, you can choose the invoicing method:

If the accounting employee posts a document, the system uses the percentage stored in the contract and the base amount defined in Customizing to calculate an amount for the additional cost category. The employee can make a value-based or percentage-based change to this amount when processing the posting. In Customizing, you define if the additional costs should be updated such that they decrease expenses or decrease revenues. The additional costs reduce the amount of the down payment request in Accounting and are updated statistically in the down payment chains. For invoices, the additional costs reduce the receivable or payable and are updated in Accounting such that they decrease revenues or decrease expenses.

Verifications

You can maintain agreed verifications in the contract. You can agree on a payment block for verifications if the verification does not arrive in the period specified. You define the payment block in Customizing.

Deferred Tax

Deferred taxes (known as minimum actual taxes in the construction industry) are taxes that are not reported to the tax authorities at the time of the incoming invoice, but at a later time. Depending on the legal requirements in your country, you can define the reporting time in Customizing, that is when the deferred tax should be reported to the tax authorities. The following procedures are supported:

Determine Accounting Document Type

In Customizing, you can store which document type should be used for the accounting documents when a posting is created in the DP chain. If the available Customizing settings are not sufficient, you can store your own logic for determining the document type in a customer-specific implementation.