Posting customer invoices in SAP S/4HANA 2023 TM

[Michael_Haase]

Dear friends of TM,

When talking about transport management, many people might think basically of the physical movement of some kind of cargo. But when digging deeper in the end-to-end processes it becomes soon obvious how many different process steps are possible or necessary. And one of those is the posting of the customer invoices based on the outbound delivery.

The most known way of posting customer invoices is using the capabilities of SD-Billing, as for example transactions VF01, VF04 etc. or equivalent functions. But from release SAP S/4HANA 2023 on, customer invoices can be posted also from a freight document in TM, allowing a more refined set up of your processes as we will see in the following.

Let’s get into detail about this.

We’re in an outbound scenario where we have a sales order and an outbound delivery. One of those or both are integrated with TM and the respective freight unit is already planned on a freight order.

At some point in time the transport vehicle is loaded and goods issue will be posted which is the prerequisite for posting the customer invoice.

With SAPS/4HANA 2023 we have now the possibility to post the customer invoice from the TM freight document in the following ways:

• Automatically:

In the freight order/booking type, you have the possibility to define a particular event at which the posting of the customer invoice is triggered:

In this example, you can set up your process that the customer invoice is posted as soon as the transport vehicle has departed from your yard. This gives you the chance to refine your process set up so that customer invoices are posted at a well-defined step in the process (and not only ‘some time after goods issue’).

• Manually:

You have also the chance to post (or cancel) the customer invoice manually at the freight document. So, transport planners with appropriate competencies can now stay at their freight order/booking where transport execution happens.

What is done in both cases functionality-wise is that at first the prerequisite that goods issue needs to be posted beforehand is of course still be checked. And afterwards the regular functions from SD-Billing are called.

Now, when we look at transaction VF01 we see that the user has the chance to enter the following data for the creation of the customer invoice:

• Billing type
• Billing date
• Service rendering date
• Pricing date.

When customer invoices are posted from a TM freight document you don’t have the possibility to enter this data manually. In TM, we work with the default billing type ‘F2’ and with BAdI /SCMTMS/BADI_LI_TM_SD_BIL you have the chance to change the billing type and to provide the dates (resp. adjust the default dates).

From that, we have a functional equivalence between the posting of customer invoices from a TM freight document or from functions in SD-Billing.

Now, if you can post and cancel customer invoices, you might also want to see them somewhere to check at least, that they have been created.

This is realized as follows:

• Customer invoices appear in the document flow of TM documents.
• And also in the document references of freight units.

One remark to the references…you can still do both in a process, post (or cancel) the customer invoices from TM or from SD-Billing and the references are stored as just described.

Furthermore, all functionality described is available with FPS2 of SAP S/4HANA 2023 for the TM embedded scenario but some parts are already available at earlier feature packs of SAP S/4HANA 2023.

Best regards,

Michael