Central Travel Center Card with Central Payment

You use this process variant if your travel agency settles certain travel services (normally flights and rail connections) using a central travel center card (lodged card, company account, BTA card) for which you, as a company, receive the invoice and assume full liability. This process variant can be combined with the process variants for personal cards.

Prerequisites

To be able to use this credit card clearing process variant, the general prerequisites described in Credit Card Clearing must be met, as well as the following special requirements:

In Customizing, you must have defined the expense types for individual receipts that are flagged as Paid by Company and that are also assigned to the transaction keys of your credit card company. If you are using service providers, you can enter these here as default values.

Customizing activity: Travel Expenses Master Data Credit Card Clearing Define Assignment Table for Credit Card Clearing
If you work with multiple central travel center cards, you should use one service provider. While the system always posts an expense type without a service provider to the same clearing account, a combination of expense type and service provider can be posted to the special clearing account of the respective travel center card.

Customizing activity: Travel Expenses Master Data Credit Card Clearing Define Assignment Table for Credit Card Clearing
If you have entered multiple service providers, you require a special wage type for the account determination of the clearing account for each credit card company. You assign this wage type to the combination of expense type and service provider.

Customizing activity: Travel Management Integration of Travel Management with Payroll Wage Types Assign Wage Types to Travel Expense Types for Individual Receipts
For expense report postings, you need to make sure that the With Credit Card Information option is selected for all wage types that are assigned to expense type Paid by Company. Only in this way do you ensure that, for the automatic clearing of open items, the necessary data (such as credit card number and transaction number) is also transferred to Financial Accounting.

Customizing activity: Travel Management Integration of Travel Management with Payroll Wage Types Define Assignment of Wage Type to Symbolic Account

Here, you assign a second symbolic account (the clearing account) to the wage type identified as Paid by Company and select the W/o CO Receivr and With Credit Card Information entries.

To clear the transaction data from the posted expense report with the items in the invoice file from the credit card company, SAP recommends the following procedure:

Create a G/L account with open item management as the clearing account for paid receipts for each travel center card (account is the same as the GR/IR account from Materials Management).
Set up infrastructure for electronically processing incoming invoices in accounts payable accounting.

Process

You are using a central credit card that is used by your company's travel center or by the travel agency for booking travel services.

For employees, this means that the largest items of expense reports do not go through their own bank accounts. However, to ensure that their expense reports are complete and that all costs are assigned to the correct cost objects, employees must integrate the receipts already paid by the company into their expense reports alongside their personal expenses.

With the function for displaying credit card receipts (program RPRCCC_DISPLAY_RECEIPTS), you can check which credit card transactions are not yet assigned to an expense report. Depending on the credit card company, you will receive the current credit card transactions on a daily or periodic basis to import into SAP Travel Management.
Credit card transactions identified as Paid by Company cannot be deleted from the receipt buffer since Financial Accounting requires every single receipt for reconciliation and invoice verification purposes. In paid credit card receipts, you cannot change the currency, amount, or exchange rate manually. These can be converted into other paid expense types only by means of the Receipt Wizard. In most cases, no conversion is needed for travel center card receipts.
In parallel to this, you also receive an invoice file at regular intervals (for example, every 10 days) that - as long as the correct infrastructure exists - is automatically entered as an incoming invoice in Financial Accounting. The offsetting entry in the vendor account for the credit card company is made to the clearing account for paid receipts for each travel center card. This is the account that is also posted to by expense reports.
To support invoice verification, the system uses the unique transaction number of the credit card company and the credit card number as clearing criteria in addition to the standard criteria (currency and amount). At the end of the month, only the disputed items or items for which no expense report or credit card invoice exists still need to be processed manually.

Special Features for External Service Providers

You can also use the travel center cards to settle travel services for external service providers that travel on behalf of the company. Since these people do not have a personnel number within your company, the system identifies these lines as containing errors when the credit card data is imported. In such cases, we recommend that you define a separate business process. You can do this by:

Creating travel master records (FI-TV mini-master records) for each external service provider in a separate number range and accounting area.

Advantage: Clear assignment of responsibility and costs, decentralized expense report for external service providers (invoice verification), and transfer to FI

Disadvantage: high administration effort
Creating a travel master record (FI-TV mini-master record) for each cost responsibility area in a separate number range and accounting area.
Manually posting to the clearing account for the paid travel services for each travel center card

The following figure provides an overview of this process.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Credit Card Clearing: Process Variant 4

Special Features for Cash Withdrawals Using Corporate Credit Cards

If you allow employees to use their corporate credit cards to make cash withdrawals, this can help you avoid the costs for paying and managing trip-related advances.

Corporate Credit Cards with Personal Liability (Process Variants 1 and 2)

Create a CASH expense type for individual receipts in Customizing. This expense type must of type Reimburse to Employee and assigned to the relevant transaction key of the credit card company.
After the credit card data has been transferred to SAP Travel Management, the employee assigns the payment to an expense type. Since CASH is not a reimbursable expense type, the employee has to split this payment by assigning the items with trip-related expenses to the reimbursable expense type for which he or she used cash (for example, taxi, tip, bus trip, and so on). To ensure that the correct exchange rate is used, we recommend that you use the Receipt Wizard to do this. Private expenses can simply be derived from the original amount.

Corporate Credit Card with Company Liability (Process Variant 3)

Create the CASP expense type for individual receipts in Customizing. This expense type must of type Paid by Company and assigned to the relevant transaction key of the credit card company.
After the credit card data has been transferred to SAP Travel Management, the employee assigns the cash payment amount to an expense type. Since CASP is not a reimbursable expense type, the employee has to split this payment by using the Receipt Wizard to assign the trip-related expenses to the reimbursable expense type for which he or she used cash (for example, taxi, tip, bus trip, and so on). When splitting the payment, the employee must identify any private expenses using the Receipt Wizard; these are later debited from the employee's account.