Accounts Receivables-A Walk Through Part1

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Account Receivables is one of the most commonly used financial concepts in any organization. By definition Accounts Receivable (AR) means the amount a customer owes to a company for the goods or services provided by the company. You can see AR in the balance sheet of a company under current assets and therefore has major role to play on the cash flow of a company. The general logic is, less the AR the better will be company cash flow.

As AR has serious roles to play, an extensive analysis is always required on this subject , for eg. when is the money due, top 10 receivable items, ageing of the receivables etc. Now, SAP BW makes all those analysis possible using the standard extractors. With this blog I intend to provide the beginners a basic knowledge on functional aspect as well as the technical aspect of AR.

Functional Flow

AR document automatically gets created in the system whenever an invoice is posted against a customer sales order.  So each AR document has a corresponding invoice reference attached to it. You can see the same in the document flow of a sales document as shown below

The important parameter of AR is the customer itself, as each AR document represents a customer line item. The other important aspects are

• Payment Term – Each AR documents will have a payment term defined in it. Payment term is the terms defined by the company to its customer for the payment. For eg a payment term of 90 days means the customer can pay the company within 90days.

• Base Line Date – This is the date from which payment terms gets applicable. This can be the AR posting date or document date etc.

• Net due Date – This is the date when the receivable becomes due. An example would be that an AR document base line date of 01.01.2013 has a payment term of 30days will have a net due date as 31.01.2013. SAP BW data source 0FI_AR_3/4 calculates the net due date using the function module DETERMINE_DUE_DATE from fields ZFBDT, ZBD1T, ZBD2T, ZBD3T, BLDAT, KOART, REBZG, REBZT, SHKZG in tables BSID and BSAD.

• GL Account – Each AR customer line item will have GL account attached to it. You can see the same in the GL view of the AR document. GL account will help in categorizing whether the AR is an advance, receivable, retention, 3^rd party receivables etc.

• Document Status –The status determines whether the AR is still open or whether it is cleared. If the clearing date is available in the AR document it means that the AR document is cleared.

SAP Tables & Transaction code

In R/3 system the AR data gets stored in tables BSAD and BSID. BSID table consists of  open AR item and BSAD consist of the  cleared item.  0FI_AR_3/4 Data Source  extracts Accounts Receivable Accounting line items from tables BSID (open items) and BSAD (cleared items). FBL5N is the T code generally used to check the Receivables data for a customer. FBL5N enables a user to check the open items as on any given date and provides all the detailed level information. You can check the GL wise balance also using FAGLB03 or FAGLL03.

In the next part I will try to provide the details of the BW flow and key reports on Receivables.  Request all to provide your feedback and share your knowledge on this subject.

Thanks in Advance

Regards

Gajesh