Action Processing

You use action processing to determine and maintain actions (downstream activities in a business process) that are relevant in billing. The determined actions are executed by triggering the Post Processing Framework (PPF). You can trigger the determination and maintenance of the following actions, among others:

Print billing document
Output billing document by fax
Output billing document by e-mail
Trigger workflows (for example, to the person responsible)
Call methods (customer enhancement option for action processing)

Prerequisites

You have created all relevant business partners prior to billing
Business partner data plays a central role in action determination. In the standard system, actions must be determined for the business partner role “Bill-To Party” , whereas action determination is optional for all other business partner roles.
You have made all the relevant customizing settings for partner processing, as described in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Billing Services Define Settings for Partner Processing .

Only those business partners that are transferred from SAP CRM business transactions are checked and further processed in billing.
You have made the following settings in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, by choosing Basic Functions Actions Actions in Billing Change Actions and Conditions :
- Defined how actions should be processed further, by choosing Define Action Profiles and Actions
- Defined the processing conditions under which a particular processing type should be called up, by choosing Define Conditions.
  You could, for example, define that the processing type “Print Billing Document” is called up as a default, and that a workflow is also triggered to inform the person responsible when amounts are posted in accounting (transfer status “Transferred”).
You have assigned the action profile to a billing type in Customizing for Intellectual Property Management, by choosing Billing and Settlement Define Billing Types for IPM License Settlements . This determines which actions should be determined with action processing for a particular billing type

Activities

Action Determination

As soon as you have saved a billing document or triggered collective billing, the system calls up action determination in the background. By calling up the PPF, the system determines for every billing document:

The bill-to party
How many billing document copies are sent
The output medium (for example, print, e-mail, or fax)
The address of the recipient

Each combination of the above information and other control data in a billing document header corresponds to an action that the system saves in an action list in the billing application.

Note Note

Each billing document has exactly one bill-to party. Each bill-to party can trigger the determination of multiple actions for a billing document and for different output media (for example, print and e-mail).

You can send any number of copies of a billing document to different recipients, either when you create an invoice for the first time, or for billing documents that have already been created and sent. These invoice copies are exact duplicates of the original invoice that can be marked as copies, if necessary

End of the note.

Action Processing

The standard system uses a selection report to execute actions collectively on a regular basis. You can change the time of action processing in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, by choosing Start of the navigation path Basic Functions Next navigation step Actions Actions in Billing Change Actions and Conditions Define Action Profiles and Actions Action Definition End of the navigation path . In the field Processing Time, you can select the following:

Immediate Processing if you want the system to process actions directly after action determination
Process When Saving Document if you want the system to process actions when it billing document data is posted in the database

The system processes individual actions in the action list by doing the following:

Reading output data
- Reading the billing document referenced in the action list
- Evaluating processing conditions
Calling the appropriate processing methods of SAP Smart Forms for each action (in particular for the output medium):
- Processing output data (by sorting, grouping, sub-totaling and converting currency of output data)
- Formatting output data (according to customer-specific forms and invoice layouts)

As a result, SAP Smart Forms creates a corresponding output document (for example, a printed invoice) and automatically sends it to the appropriate recipient.