I had a chance to talk with our vendor guy, and without coding a solution, he thought it would probably be a manual process. Here’s a rough outline of a manual process you might consider:

1. Place the supplier invoice on payment block. If all of the suppliers invoices will be like this, you could do that on the supplier header.
2. When your customer approves the product and you’re ready to pay. Remove the payment block.
3. Change your baseline date to that day.
4. Set your terms to what you want them to be if they do not default to the right thing.

The key points would be that you can block payment at an invoice level, you can change the baseline date, and you can change the terms as needed…so if you set terms to 1% net 30 and changed the baseline date to today, you get a payment 30 days from now.

Beyond that, you’re probably getting into a coded solution.

I’d love to hear if you figure something out that automatic.

Cheers!
Byron

That’s a tricky scenario that you have, and not one that I can answer off the top of my head. I’m glad you asked, though, because it will give me the opportunity to learn a little more about an area that I haven’t spent much time in. I’ll check around with our Vendor experts here to see how they might address it.

In the mean time, here is my fairly basic understanding of the dates:

• Document date – this is the date that the document is created…the Invoice would have a document date, as would the vendor payment posting
• Posting date – this is the date that puts the transaction into the proper posting period. You might be enterring an invoice on February 4 for a January expense, so you’d make the posting date the same as the Invoice date which might be something like 1/25/2009. That gets the expense back into January. The document date, would be 2/4/2009.
• Value date (this one might help in your situation) – this date is used to indicate either when a revenue was earned, or when an expense or service was received/consumed. I’m not real familiar with this one, but it probably has to do with revenue recognition and tax issues. In your situation, the value date might be related to customer approval, or when the tool was actually used to perform the work. I don’t know if it would have any tax ramifications if you did use it for those purposes, so you’d want to be sure it didn’t before using it.
• Due date – I’m pretty sure this is the expected payment date for both AR and AP
• System date – not sure what this is other than a timestamp from the computer processing the transaction. Might be used in logging

I’m sure you’d like to develop an automated process to accomplish your goal there, but that might require some code. If it is possible to change payment terms and due dates after an invoice is posted (I would suppose it is), it might be feasible to have a manual process where those are changed when payment for the tools are approved subsequent to customer acceptance.

As I said, I’ll ask around to see if anyone has any ideas.

Cheers!
Byron

As always thoroughly enjoy your site – excellent stuff.

Could you post something that clarifies the different dates at play for vendor payment. Like Document date, posting date, value date, due date, system date, etc.

here is my issue
——————–
We have a requirement where payment terms need to kick in, based on some arbitrary date ( I am wondering if I can use value date or due date, to capture this).

a little background
————————
We are tier1 automotive supplier. We buy tools from vendors that are used to manufacture automotive parts. We don’t pay the vendor until customer approves the part that we manufactured using the tool that the vendor supplied.

Since the customer approval happens sometimes year or more after goods/services were received – I don’t see a easy way to configure payment terms for this.

Plus this date is a moving target. Approval seldom happens on the date we forecast.

How would you configure this scenario in SAP & still have visibility to open commitment & cash flow planning?

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Thanks again, and Cheers!
Byron

So please add my mail id : –

pravinagarwal@polarinc.com

If you want to write an upload program, the one we used did the uploading through BAPI: BAPI_ACC_DOCUMENT_POST

I discuss it a bit in this post: http://www.whypad.com/posts/sap-fico-bapi-for-uploading-accounting-documents/96/ and it wasn’t real great as it didn’t properly create profitability segments (for CO-PA use).

Our conversion/upload program also accessed several Z-tables (custom tables) and did look ups for mapping and exceptions, so they really wouldn’t be of much use to you.
If I were doing it over again, I would probably do my conversions/mapping outside of SAP (in Access or Excel) and then use a product like ZOption’s GLSU (GL Spreadsheet Uploader) to upload my journal entries. We were trying to fix our upload program when we finally gave up and bought ZOption. It was well worth the price…many times over! Here’s my write-up on them:
http://www.whypad.com/posts/sap-uploading-gl-journal-entries-the-easy-way/24/

Hope the weather doesn’t get too bad down there in Houston.

Regards,
Byron

I don’t suppose you don’t mind sharing that ABAP program for GL data transfer? Or where can I get info on that? I’m new to LSMW so I can’t tell you much until after I play with it this weekend. I’ll let you know how it went. I have all my GL data on Excel. After that I will need to do the same thing for cost centers.

Getting wet in Houston,
Johnny

Best regards,
Byron