In the last couple of years our customers have been asking us for a solution to support Invoicing Payment Plans within SAP SRM. And perhaps you’ll remember the restriction: Only customers who are using the Procurement for Public Sector (PPS) scenario could make use of this feature which is common use within SAP Materials Management (MM).
Invoicing Payment Plans support procurement processes which involve payment milestones instead of goods- and/or invoice receipts. A simple process example where a payment plan can be used is the payment of a utility vendor.
With invoicing plans or payment plans, you optimize the steering and tracking of payments of purchase orders. Billing documents can be automatically generated in SAP ECC, which are based on the payment plans you specify. This is reducing manual error and eliminating unintentional delays in payment and leads not only to a better relationship with your suppliers, but it also improves the Accounts Payable process.
But as said you only can make use of these benefits in the PPS scenario. You have to switch to your ECC system to create a Purchase Order with an invoicing plan, which is inconvenient when you use your SRM system as a single point of entry for your procurement processes.
Well the good news is that SAP brings this functionality within the support pack 9 of SAP SRM 7.13, but the best news is that you can already make use of it as of today!
The exact same functionality that is available within MM has now been fully integrated within your SAP SRM system running as extended classic scenario. You can now use payment plans on SRM purchase orders and all invoice handling is done in SAP ECC, as the payment plan data is replicated from SAP SRM to SAP ECC, which can be used for invoice verification. Is that all?
No, the same support pack also contains support now for Down Payments in Purchase Orders running in an extended classic scenario within SRM, where you can benefit from the integration of down payment types within a SRM Purchase Order. These Down Payment types can be defined on header- and line item level within a SRM Purchase Order, based on the agreements made with a supplier that has been granted for a down payment.