Understanding customer transactions in accounts receivable

Using SAP R3? You may not know everything that there is to know about such a comprehensive product. This tip, excerpted from the InformIT Web site, discusses using accounts receivable for recording customer transactions.

As soon as the master data is stored for a customer, a customer transaction can occur. If the master record is for a one-time account, the data will be sparse.

If you installed and configured SAP SD-Sales and Distribution with the SAP FI-

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Financial Accounting system, invoices entered in the SD system are automatically posted to General Ledger accounts in FI. Otherwise, the route to the FI-GL General Ledger accounts runs through an SAP open interface, which transfers and posts invoice data to General Ledger accounts automatically. If you must manually enter an invoice that has not been posted automatically, SAP R/3 provides all possible help. You can enter and post a check received and match the payment to specific open items in the customer account, all in one operation.

The successful posting of a transaction does not occur until the necessary data is recorded as an SAP document and is complete and error-free. You can set aside a transaction document before it is ready for posting, in which case the system validates any information you have already entered and reports to you any discrepancies.

The SAP document must end up with a document header showing posting date, document date, document reference number, and currency key. The body of the document contains one or more line items that show the amount and identify the product and terms of payment. The system generates certain line items, such as tax entries, cash discounts, and exchange rate differences, as applicable. You can set up helping routines and use standard data entry functions such as the following:


Offering default values that you can edit at the time of entry
Recalling for copying and editing a previous screen
Retaining data for individual users for several transactions
Adapting a copy of a data entry screen so that it is better suited to a set of expected transactions
Searching for an account number by using matchcodes to narrow the search.

An SAP document that records a previous transaction can be copied to act as a sample or a model to be edited. This sample can be a regular document that has been set aside, perhaps as an incomplete transaction document. The posting date and new values may have to be changed before posting.

To read more of the document from which this tip is extracted, click over to the InformIT Web site. Registration is required on InformIT, but it's free.


 

This was first published in November 2000

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