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 Claims and Funds Management

 

Technical Data

Technical Name of Business Function

CRM_CF_1

Type of Business Function

Enterprise Business Function

Available As Of

SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0

Technical Usage

CRM Core

Application Component

Funds Management (CRM-FM), Claims Management (CRM-CLA)

Directly Dependent Business Function Requiring Activation in Addition

ERP, Integration with Claims and Funds Management (ERP_CF_INTEGRATION_1)

FSCM Functions 3 (FIN_FSCM_CCD_3)

You can use this business function to acquire increased business functionality in the areas of claims and funds management and trade promotion management.

Integration

Some new features in this business function require integration with SAP Enhancement Package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0.

Related business functions are FSCM, Integration with Financial Shared Service Center (ERP_CF_INTEGRATION_1), and FSCM Functions 3 (FIN_FSCM_CCD_3).

The business functions Claims and Funds Management (CRM_CF_1) and Partner Channel Management, Market Development Funds (CRM_PCM_MDF_1) share the following functions:

If you activate Partner Channel Management, Market Development Funds (CRM_PCM_MDF_1), then you activate the above additional functions regardless of whether or not you activate Claims and Funds Management (CRM_CF_1).

The Trade Promotion Management (CRM_TPM_1) business function provides additional features for the core trade promotion management application.

The business functions Claims and Funds Management (CRM_CF_1) and Sales and Service (CRM_SLS_SRV_1) share the function New attribute for territory management (see Sales and Service). If you activate Claims and Funds Management (CRM_CF_1), then you activate the above function regardless of whether or not you activate Sales and Service (CRM_SLS_SRV_1).

Prerequisites

You have installed the following components as of SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0:

Type of Component

Component

Is Needed Only for the Following Features

Software Component

BBPCRM701

Not applicable

Technical component or business content, for example, Portal Content

SAP Enhancement Package 5 for ERP 6.0

Not applicable

You have activated the following business functions:

  • ERP, Integration with Claims and Funds Management (ERP_CF_INTEGRATION_1)

  • FSCME Functions 3 (FIN_FSCM_CCD_3)

Features

TPM with SAP ERP Enhanced Rebate Processing and Funds and Claims

In trade promotion planning for smaller direct accounts, brand owners such as consumer goods companies tend to plan their variable rebates at a higher level than where they actually execute the trade promotions, for efficiency reasons. This would typically include both the account and the product dimension.

However, the downstream processes still have to operate on the typical granular level of account and product: Financial liabilities in the form of accruals for rebates must be incurred on account level, and payments for promotional performance must also be made to the individual account, subordinated to the planning level. To support product-level profitability analysis, accruals and payment amounts must be prorated on the products that are subordinated to the product planning level.

By using SAP ERP enhanced rebates processing with SAP CRM trade promotions, you can support these requirements: SAP ERP rebate agreements can accommodate multiple rebate recipients, thus enabling brand owners to build accruals for variable rebates and to settle the rebates on product and account level.

In SAP CRM 2007, SAP CRM trade promotion management was enhanced with SAP CRM budget control using claims and funds. However, brand owners, in their SAP CRM trade promotions, only had the following two options:

  • Use SAP ERP standard or enhanced rebate processing without using SAP CRM funds and claims. Order management, accruals calculation, rebate settlement, and finalization would all run in SAP ERP.

  • Use SAP ERP standard or enhanced rebate processing in combination with SAP CRM funds and claims. Order management would then run in SAP ERP, while accruals would be built in SAP CRM funds and settlement and finalization would also take place in SAP CRM. SAP ERP rebate agreements would not be used for calculating accruals.

Brand owners can now use SAP ERP enhanced rebate processing in their trade promotions while building accruals in SAP ERP and running a full integration with budget control using SAP CRM claims and funds.

For more information, see TPM with SAP ERP Enhanced Rebate Processing and Funds and Claims.

Live Rates for Trade Promotions

You can now use live rates with trade promotion management to do the following:

  • Plan and calculate promotional budgets for trade promotion activities

  • Integrate with SAP CRM funds management to post budget amounts based on live rates

  • Monitor and manage the live rates plan throughout the entire planning and execution process

  • Integrate planned or actual data from external applications

For more information, see Live Rates.

Claim Settlement Integration into SAP ERP Billing (SD-BIL)

Claim settlement documents can now be transferred to the Billing (SD-BIL) component in SAP ERP, stored as billing documents, and further processed (through to financial accounting). This enables customers already using Billing (SD-BIL) to leverage their existing investments in localization and output formatting while still taking advantage of the new claim processing capability in SAP CRM. Note that claim settlement in SAP CRM is based on the SAP CRM billing functionality.

This integration option supports the following scenarios:

  • Processing of claim settlements in SAP CRM and use of Billing (SD-BIL) for the following:

    • Taxation of claims, invoice claims, deduction claims, and settlements, with tax account determination in SAP ERP

    • Output (in printed or electronic form) of settlement documents according to local legal requirements

    • Document numbering according to local legal requirements

    • Integration into accounting, particularly for the determination of financial accounts and profitability segments in controlling

    • Text determination

    • Integration with SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

  • Processing of rebate settlements (for example, account determination, taxation, and printing) when SAP CRM trade claims and funds is integrated with SAP ERP enhanced rebate processing.

Note Note

  • To use this function, you need to activate the business function ERP, Integration with Claims and Funds Management (ERP_CF_INTEGRATION_1) in SAP enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0.

  • Settlement data for prepayments and carried-over prepayments is not transferred to Billing (SD-BIL).

End of the note.

For more information, see Integration of Claim Settlements into SAP ERP Billing (SD-BIL).

Transfer of Notes for Settlement Documents to Integrated Applications

You can now transfer notes that have been created for claim settlement documents to an integrated system, such as SAP ERP.

Note Note

  • If you use integration to the Billing (SD-BIL) component in SAP ERP, as described above, you cannot add or change notes in SAP CRM once a settlement document has been transferred.

  • If settlement documents are transferred directly to SAP ERP accounting, you can add or change notes in SAP CRM after transfer.

End of the note.

For more information, see the description of the billing feature Transfer Note Texts to Follow-On Appl. in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Start of the navigation path Billing Next navigation step Configure Application End of the navigation path.

Claims Taxation

Taxation is now available in combination with trade promotion management.

For more information, see Claim Taxation in Trade Promotion Management.

Upload of SAP ERP Statistics Values to SAP CRM Funds Management

Smart Filtering During Upload of Statistics Values

Condition records are created in SAP CRM for SAP CRM trade promotions and are transferred to SAP ERP. From these condition records, statistics are built that are then updated continuously through SAP ERP billing documents. The statistics values are uploaded back to SAP CRM and posted to SAP CRM funds management. This is done with the help of reports that filter the values based on the funds plan ID.

Smart filtering is now used to upload changed values only and ignore the unchanged ones. This improves upload performance considerably.

New Upload Reports

There are four new reports available in the batch processing framework for the integration of trade promotions with budget control in SAP CRM funds management. You use the reports to upload trade promotion-related data from SAP ERP to SAP CRM funds management. As a result, the system generates fund postings for the corresponding value categories. You can see the aggregated values for each of these value categories in the fund checkbook and the fund usage checkbook. The reports use middleware to upload the data and are available in addition to existing reports that use RFC calls.

The reports are as follows:

  • Discounts and Free Goods Load

  • Sales Volume Load (Middleware)

  • External Accruals Load

  • Actuals and Commitments Load

For more information, see Reports for TPM, Funds, Claims, and MDF.

Funds Management

You can now use a new option in Customizing for the fund determination process.

The All Branches Down option in the Define Fund Determination Profile activity is a top-down search that checks for funds in all branches of the account hierarchy. The search proceeds down the hierarchy until it finds at least one fund in each branch. This search option is useful when performing budget transfers. After selecting the option, you can configure the system to search the hierarchy down to a relative level, a fixed level, or both. The To Level represents the relative number of levels to search down from, starting after the account hierarchy node level specified in the fund attributes. The Max Level is the fixed number of levels that are searched starting from the top of the account hierarchy.

For example, you set 3 under To Level and 8 under Max Level. For an account hierarchy node at the second level of the hierarchy, the system goes from the first level of the hierarchy to the second, searches the second level, and does not find any funds. The system continues searching down as far as the fifth level in the hierarchy, as this is three levels after the account hierarchy node, and does not surpass the maximum level. For an account hierarchy node at the sixth level, the system can only search down two levels instead of three, as it must stop at the eighth level in the hierarchy.

For more information, see Fund Determination.

Claim Duplicate Diagnosis

You can now identify duplicate claims. The claim duplicate diagnosis enables you to avoid duplicate payments or settlements and to reduce the workload for researching duplicate claims.

You can use the following functions to identify duplicate claims:

  • Claim deduplication profiles that define how the system identifies duplicate claims.

    You assign claim deduplication profiles to claim and claim submission transaction types.

  • Checking criteria that the system uses to identify duplicate claims, for example, Claiming Account, External Reference Number, and Claimed Amount. You can also define your own checking criteria.

  • Deduplication checking procedures such as Initial and Complete. These are run automatically or manually.

    • The initial procedure runs when you create or make changes to a claim but before you add a trade promotion. At this point the system starts the initial claim deduplication check.

    • The complete procedure runs when a trade promotion has been added to a claim.

    • Error or warning messages are displayed to the user when a duplicate is found.

    • Ignore duplicate reasons

      When a duplicate claim is found by the system and there is a valid reason for the duplicate claim, you can choose the reason for continuing to process the claim.

Note Note

If a claim has the status Canceled or Corrected, you cannot run the deduplication check.

End of the note.

For more information, see Duplicate Claim Diagnosis.

Claim Chargeback Recovery

You can now handle chargeback recoveries more efficiently using the claim chargeback recovery process, which allows for easier data exchanges between SAP ERP and SAP CRM.

You can now do the following:

  • Transfer payments directly from SAP ERP to SAP CRM for processing

    This reduces the number of required manual entries in the each system, and ensures quicker and more consistent results when dealing with recoveries.

  • Create the claim chargeback recovery in SAP ERP, and then navigate directly from SAP ERP to the claim chargeback recovery overview in SAP CRM after payment transfer is complete

  • Search for chargeback recoveries in SAP CRM

  • Add chargebacks to existing claim chargeback recoveries

    You can add one or more chargebacks to which the payment should be applied.

  • View attributes of payments that have been transferred to SAP CRM

    You can read existing attachments and add new ones. You can also create and update the parties involved.

  • Release claim chargeback recoveries and transfer data back to SAP ERP

    After you have applied the chargeback recovery, you release it. Releasing the chargeback recovery triggers a validation process to ensure that the repayment amount is equal to the assigned amount. Then SAP CRM transfers the payment ID, dispute case ID, amount, and currency back to SAP ERP. SAP ERP then applies the payment to the item. In cases where more than one open item is found, the older one takes precedence.

  • Archive claim chargeback recoveries

For more information, see Claim Chargeback Recovery.

Multiple Claim Submissions

You can quickly validate and approve claims by combining claim submissions into a single claim.

You can now do the following:

  • Create a combined claim from the search results list for claim submissions

    You can combine multiple deduction claim submissions into a single deduction claim, or create a single invoice claim from several invoice claim submissions. You cannot mix claim submission types; in other words, you cannot combine a deduction claim submission with an invoice claim submission.

  • Add and delete claim submissions

  • Add a trade promotion to the combined claim

  • Default validated amounts to claim submissions in the claim resolution table

    These amounts are based on the reserved amount defined in the fund usages. If a project requires it, you can use a business add-in (BAdI) to override the delivered setup and enable allocation of the full unresolved amount to trade promotions and their expense types and product combinations.

  • Validate, approve, and settle the combined claim

    You validate and approve the claim only at the header level. This makes it possible to simultaneously validate and approve each claim submission included in the claim.

For more information, see Multiple Claim Submission.

Generic Functions for Claims

The following generic functions are now available:

  • Ability to configure SAP CRM to work with external references

    An assignment block for additional external references allows you to record external reference numbers defined by the claiming account to identify their documents. These numbers can be included in follow-up documents. This assignment block is available for claim submissions, claims, chargebacks, prepayments, and carried-over prepayments.

  • The following additional assignment blocks for various claim objects:

    • Parties Involved

      This displays customized partner functions. This assignment block is available for claim item objects.

    • Scheduled Actions

      This allows you to schedule actions pertaining to the claims management object. This assignment block is available for claims, claim submissions, chargebacks, prepayments, and carried-over prepayments.

For more information, see Claims, Claim Submission, Chargeback, and Prepayment.