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lindasun02
Employee
Employee
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Are you already benefiting from the ready-to-use functionalities for Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to streamline your Order to Cash billing process? Billing documents that are not posted to accounting often remain unnoticed or unresolved, causing roadblocks such as: 

  • Inaccurate revenue data sales and financial reporting 

  • Increased days sales outstanding 

  • Delayed customer invoicing and revenue recognition, causing negative impact on cash flow. 


Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting can minimize these inefficiencies in your billing process by streamlining and reducing the time to resolution. Let’s look at the key benefits: 


Figure 1: Manage Situation Types app with Pre-delivered Situation Templates that can be copied to create your own customizable Situation Type.


 

1. Automatic check for billing documents not posted to accounting 


Typically, billing clerks may run a billing document report periodically to check the posting statuses and identify those not posted to accounting. The reality is that this task is often postponed to the month-end and the issues don’t get any attention until the last minute.  Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting, automatically checks for documents requiring attention based on predefined conditions and at a predefined interval. 


Figure 2: Inform of situation instances that match the predefined Conditions. In this case, the filter is applied for several Sold To Parties in the Manage Situation Types app.


 


Figure 3: Set a batch job start time in the Batch Job Scheduling section of the Manage Situation Types app


 

2. Streamline error resolution by routing directly to the correct recipient  


Billing documents aren’t posted to accounting for a variety of reasons, such as account determination issues, missing pricing, and issues with master data settings. The billing clerk who runs the error report may not be the same clerk who’s responsible for resolving the error and can spend unnecessary time routing the error to different teams in the organization to reach the correct contact. With Situation Handling, the notification can be sent directly to predefined teams or recipients based on the type of issue, thereby reducing external communication efforts and ultimately reducing time to resolution. Useful criteria such as Sales Organization, Sold to Party, Bill-to Payer, Net Value, Billing Type, and so on, which can serve as further filters to route the situation instance (in this case billing document errors) to the appropriate recipient for resolution.  


Figure 4: Filter by Issue Type and other criteria in the Conditions section of the Manage Situation Types app


 


Figure 5: Issue Type and Issue Type Descriptions



Figure 6: Define situation recipients in the Responsibility by Teams section of the Manage Situation Types app


 

3. Proactive notifications to drive faster issue resolution 


Once the proper recipients are defined, they will receive proactive notifications on SAP Fiori Launchpad for situation instances that apply to them. The recipients can then take timely action to resolve and prevent downstream impacts and further delays to billing, revenue recognition, and cash receipt.  


Figure 7: Notifications in the Fiori Launchpad


 

Recipients can also access the situations using the My Situations app, which displays the open situations. The My Situations app is updated automatically after the daily batch job runs or as the recipients manually marks each instance as complete after resolution.  

 


Figure 8: My Situations app displaying open situations


 

Watch this video by the Q2C CTU Billing Team with further details about the Situation Handling use case.

In summary, Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting can provide significant value in the SD Billing Process. It does so by eliminating the manual and repetitive task of checking the posting status of billing documents. This reduces the time errors needed to reach the correct recipient for resolution and allows the said recipient to easily access the outstanding billing documents and see the issues that require their attention. Ultimately, this leads to faster issue resolution, improved operational efficiency in billing, and improved cash flow and financial performance of your business. 
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