Pricing, Shipping, Billing, Revenue and Credit
A parent overview of the Order-to-Cash sub-processes that determine what a customer pays (Pricing), how goods move (Shipping/Delivery), how revenue is billed and recognized (Billing/Revenue), and how financial risk is controlled (Credit Management). Covers how these four areas interlock across SD, LE, FI and CO, the master data and configuration that drive them, the document flow from order to accounting, and how behavior differs across ECC, S/4HANA on-premise/private cloud and S/4HANA public cloud.
Overview
A parent overview of the Order-to-Cash sub-processes that determine what a customer pays (Pricing), how goods move (Shipping/Delivery), how revenue is billed and recognized (Billing/Revenue), and how financial risk is controlled (Credit Management). Covers how these four areas interlock across SD, LE, FI and CO, the master data and configuration that drive them, the document flow from order to accounting, and how behavior differs across ECC, S/4HANA on-premise/private cloud and S/4HANA public cloud.
Lessons in this topic
- Pricing, Shipping, Billing and Credit Part 2: Configuration and Document FlowThe configuration chain behind value flow: sales document type settings (pricing procedure determination, credit groups, delivery and billing types), item and schedule line categories, copy control with pricing types, delivery-related and order-related billing, account determination and document flow tracing.
- Pricing, Shipping, Billing and Credit Part 1: The Order-to-Cash Value StreamHow the value-related SD functions fit together: pricing sets the value in the order, credit management protects exposure, availability and shipping deliver the goods, billing turns deliveries into receivables and revenue, output informs customers, and settlements/rebates adjust value afterwards — with pointers to the detailed tracks.
Interview questions covered
- Walk through the end-to-end lifecycle of a multi-year condition contract used for rebate settlement, from contract creation through business volume determination to final settlement, and identify the billing configuration decisions that most directly affect settlement accuracy.
- A high-value order is blocked by credit management, and once released, the subsequent billing document fails with a revenue account determination error. As the architect, how do you diagnose which issue is the true root cause versus a symptom?
- For certain sales orders, route determination is selecting a route with longer transit time than planned, pushing goods issue and billing dates into a different fiscal period than the order date, and finance is seeing revenue cutoff discrepancies in FI-AR at month-end close. As the architect, how would you diagnose whether route determination configuration is the root cause of this cross-period revenue leakage?
- A global rollout requires shipping point determination to consider plant, loading group, and shipping condition, but credit management is blocking deliveries for a subset of orders whose shipping points route through a specific distribution center with different credit exposure rules. How would you architect a solution?
- Walk through the process by which values calculated in the pricing procedure become the basis for real-time credit exposure updates in SAP Credit Management, and explain the design considerations for a multi-entity global rollout.
- A mid-size distributor's revenue, credit exposure and rebate accruals disagree for promotional orders. How do you analyse the value flow?
- A new order type was created by copy, but orders aren't credit-checked, deliveries use the wrong type and invoices reprice. What do you check?