Dec 5, 2021

New S/4 HANA 2020 Bank Sub-Ledger functionality config for Electronic Bank Statement

 In S/4 HANA 2020, SAP has released a new functionality called "Bank Sub-Ledger" that will allow companies with a large number of Bank Accounts to reduce their number GL Accounts in their Chart of Accounts significantly and manage them with just a few GL accounts.

Traditionally, in SAP we would have one GL Main Bank Account representing each House Bank and Bank account number (Account ID) combination that you have open with a given bank, plus a series of outgoing and incoming Bank clearing accounts for this combination. These accounts represent your issued checks not cashed by a vendor or Payments that you have received that you have not deposited yet or cleared with the bank. Depending on your business requirements, the different payments methods you have and other situations, you could end up with 4, 5 or 6 of these Bank clearing accounts. We also called them bank sub-accounts. Finally if your account is held in foreign currency, you will also need a Bank adjustment GL Account to post your foreign currency valuation at Month End.

It will look like this

105100 Bank Main account (House Bank)
    105101 Bank outgoing checks
    105102 Bank Incoming payments
    105103 Bank Lockbox clearing
    105104 Bank outgoing electronic payments
    105109 Bank adjustment account


At the end, you will have something that looks similar to this for each bank account that you have on a given Company Code. You might not have Lockbox or checks in some regions, but you will need several of this accounts to have a proper design and flexibility.

Now ... if your Company (Company Code) has many Bank accounts scattered all over the place among different banks you will end up with a large number of GL accounts within your Chart of Accounts dedicated only for your Banks. Total number of Bank Accounts x6. If you have 10 Bank Accounts, you will end up with 60 G/L Accounts only dedicated to this.

With the new S/4 HANA 2020 Bank Sub-Ledger Account, you can reduce this from 60 GL accounts to GL 6 accounts.

There are already several people that have done Blogs about how to configure and use this functionality  in SCN and other sites as well. But ... Nobody has posted anything yet on how to configure the Electronic Bank Statement for this Bank Sub-Ledger functionality. 

The traditional way of configuring the EBS when assigning GL Accounts to Accounting symbols and using the masking approach, WILL NOT WORK ! It will give you an error when you try to process an EBS file since the system is not able to do the account determination correctly. Your EBS posting rules will just fail.

This was the way to configure your Account assignment to your Account Symbols in the past when we did not have the Bank Sub-Ledger.


As I mentioned, if you do it like this; the system will not find the GL Accounts, the Account determination will fail and you will not be able to do any postings.

Now with the New Bank Sub-Ledger functionality, instead of doing the traditional masking setup, you need to configure it by putting the full GL Account number instead of masking the beginning of the string.

Configuration for EBS with Bank Sub-Leger 


Once you set it up like this, the system will start doing the Account determination properly once again.

A few notes:

#1 - There is a possibility to do a Migration from the old way to the new Bank Sub-Ledger. So, if you are Migrating to Bank Sub-Ledger, you will also need to adjust your EBS configuration. Because, most likely the migration program will not migrate and adapt this config it just changes the GL Master Data setup and other transactional tables.

#2 - OSS Note 3007105 from SAP has stated some restrictions and exceptions for this functionality. It cannot be used with Bill of Exchange Banks/Accounts and it does not work with the Foreign Exchange currency valuation process (FAGL-FCV).

This last statement is not 100% accurate to a certain point. FAGL_FCV is still able to take into consideration the Bank Sub-Ledger Open Item accounts and the Main Bank accounts balances to calculate and valuate them. But what it does not give you is a detailed posting that will specify which House Bank and Bank Account ID has valuated, but it will still valuate those amounts properly. So one of the main restrictions might not be that important at all.

I reached out to SAP with an OSS Support message asking if S/4 HANA 2021 had remediated this situation and FAGL_FCV was now working properly and they told me that they have not modified this program yet and that they will not modify it for future versions. Instead, they told me they are planning on releasing an "Advance Valuation program" that will handle it properly. But there is no timeline for that release yet.


If your Company and/or Project needs to implement this, or any of the functionalities described in my Blog, or advise about them, do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will be happy to provide you my services.

Nov 12, 2021

How to manage Company Code Registration numbers that belong to other Country different than the one in your Company Code ?


When you create a Company Code in SAP for a specific country (Ex. US), the Company Code will allow you enter certain additional parameters for that Company Code that are typical for a Country US to have them. (Ex. TIN - Tax Identification Number, and some other registration numbers that are typically required for companies doing business in the US).

For example, for Canada you will need to enter the GST Registration number, PST or QST numbers as well since your Company Code will be in country CA.

This is an important piece of information that is typically needed for Legal requirements in many countries to issue invoices showing your Registration number when you print an invoice or send information to the banks, Tax agencies or other regulatory entities. So this becomes a MUST HAVE to have it available in the system ready to be used by any of these processes.

But now, what happens if you have a US Company Code, that is registered in Canada and you need to enter the GST Number for it ?

In standard SAP configuration, you will not be able to do it within the Company Code Global settings (or Maintain Additional Parameters as of S/4 HAHA 1709), those fields for GST number will not be available since your Company is in country US and that is not required in the US.


How do you enter this in your US Company Code ?

There are 2 options

This configuration to allow you to enter this parameters is based on "Parameters Types" that are preconfigured for certain countries. In the case of GST Number, it is Parameter Type F29T01. You can look for your specific Parameter Type in Table T001I


Option # 1

 

SM30 on Table V_T001I

 

Remove country CA for this record "Parameter Type" = F29T01

If you do that, this will make type F29T01 available for any Company Code regardless of the Country. So all Company Codes all of a sudden will have available the GST Number to be entered  even belonging to any country in the world. (For me this is not the preferred approach).



Option # 2

SM30 on Table  V_T001S4H

Enter a new entry for F29T01 record and assign it to country US. If you look for F29T01, it is already assigned to Country CA as well.



This will allow to enter the GST Number for all US CoCodes. For me, this should be the preferred approach as it only affects Country US and not all countries.


Be aware that this could be overwritten by an SAP upgrade, so it might need to be redone later.


Once you are done with the configuration, you will be able to enter the foreign registration numbers in your Company Code within Company Code Global Parameters or Additional Parameters.




If your Company and/or Project needs to implement this, or any of the functionalities described in my Blog, or advise about them, do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will be happy to provide you my services.

Aug 5, 2021

How to send the different Finance outputs via email ?

A typical Business requirement now a days in today's world is to send certain Finance Outputs via email automatically from SAP as soon as you generate them. In S/4 HANA on-premise (and ECC as well), to be able to achieve this you need to deal with a little bit of custom code that needs to be added and managed in BTE's (Business Transaction Events). These ones are similar to any other User Exit.

As you might know already, there are different automatic processes in SAP that trigger outputs and when these are created, these BTEs will be called and eventually the generated outputs will be sent via email by SAP automatically if you put the appropriate code on them.

I will be talking in these post about 4 different important and key Finance Outputs:

    • Vendor Payment Advice
    • Customer Statement
    • Dunning Notice
    • Interest 

In this post I will NOT explain you how to execute the programs that generate them, what options and/or values to put in the screens. As a Consultant you should know how to run these "user" steps already. There are plenty of content about this on the Internet already. This Blog post is not for that, is to explain you the technical side of what you need to do to achieve sending these Outputs via email.

Each one of these Outputs have at least 1 (some even 2) Function Modules that need to be coded to be able to control if the output goes to the Spool, Email / Internet or Fax (nobody uses a Fax anymore). Other things that you can control too are the Sender email, Recipient email, email Subject and email body text. All of these can be managed as part of your custom code.

These FMs get assigned in Tcode FIBF and are based on a Transaction Event number that corresponds to each one of these different outputs. You cannot reuse the same code for all of them, but the idea and logic can be replicated for all of them.



1st you need to start by "registering" your Product / Output for the ones you will be dealing with. In my case, ZDUN, ZPADV_EM, ZPADV_SJ. But you can put any Product name / code that you want, then you need to flag the "Active" field as well; otherwise it will not be called.




Then once you have your Function Modules with your Custom code, you need to enter the FMs.



You go into Process Modules -> of a customer to assign them.


You make entries in this table to assign here the FMs that you have coded to manage the different options like (sender / receiver email, subject and body text). As you can see, the Process numbers represent the individual outputs.


Payment Advice

Payment Advice has 2 processes 2040 and 2050. 

Process 2040, allows you to manage Sender email address, Recipient email address, Mail Body Text and the type of Transmission Method 

  • c_finaa-nacha = '1'  - Spool
  • c_finaa-nacha = 'I'  - Internet / Email

For this SAP gives you a "Sample" FM that you can use as a base to copy and insert you own custom code. This is SAMPLE_PROCESS_00002040

Process 2050, allows you to manage email Subject

For this SAP gives you a "Sample" FM that you can use as a base to copy and insert you own custom code. This is SAMPLE_PROCESS_00002050

Customer Statement

Process 2310. This one allows you to manage Transmission method, Format (PDF), Mail Body, Mail Subject, Sender and Recipient email address.

For this SAP gives you a "Sample" FM that you can use as a base to copy and insert you own custom code. This is SAMPLE_PROCESS_00002310

Dunning Letter

Process 1040. This one allows you to manage Transmission method, Format (PDF), Mail Body, Mail Subject, Sender and Recipient email address.

For this SAP gives you a "Sample" FM that you can use as a base to copy and insert you own custom code. This is SAMPLE_PROCESS_00001040.

Interest Output

For the Interest Calculation done out of FINT Tcode, I will refer you to the below Blog post where it explains Badi FI_INT_CUS01 that needs to be implemented to manage all the same things that we did for the other Outputs. 

By the way, excellent Blog this one for Abap resources. 


The specific Abap code of each one of these Function Modules need to be done based on your particular case. I am not providing you the code in this Posting. Maybe this will be the subject of a subsequent Post.


** Note: This process applies to S/4 HANA On-Premise (ECC as well) only. For S/4 HANA Cloud the solution is completely different and based on the new Output Management Solution that works with BRF+ technology. I am not aware that this has changed for S/4 HANA 2020 version either. If you know, please let me know ...


Some Reference OSS Notes:

◈ Payment Advice: OSS 1033893, 836169
◈ Dunning: OSS 1042992
◈ Customer correspondence (Ex. Statement): OSS 1360070
◈ Interest : OSS 956981


If your Company and/or Project needs to implement this, or any of the functionalities described in my Blog, or advise about them, do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will be happy to provide you my services.