Collections with Head Office/Branch

[Former Member]

My company has a large customer base (over 1M customer master recs). When we went live on SAP we didn't use the standard tools for grouping customers like Head Office/Branch and now are interested in creating these relationships especially because collections management recognizes the head office/branch. The question is...Can this be set up after been live on SAP for a few years ? It seems that when I test this functionality, the existing open items don't adjust to the head office , only new postings recognize the relationship. Does this require some kind of data conversion to get existing open items to know the head office/branch relationships ? Anyone with experience on setting up Head Office with Collections and can attest to the pros and cons ? Are there other grouping constructs that can be used that will flow to Collections Mngmt ? Thanks for your input !

[former_member199199]

Hi Joe,

Just wanted to confirm from you as what type of industry you are referring here.

Because, SAP has number of frameworks for handling head office and sub /brach office level posting. And accordingly the master data can be used to post consolidated transaction at head office level and you can process collection accordingly.

Will wait for your reply.

Thanks,

Bodhisattwa

[Former Member]

Hi, we are in the industrial gas industry. We sell cylinders of different gases (oxygen, helium, etc) for a wide variety of uses; thus the large customer base.

I think we just need to understand pros and cons of grouping customers in collections using Head Office/Branch Office vs Alternative Payer vs possibly a custom grouping method on Business Partner.

If anyone has experience with this please share. Thanks,

Joe

[Former Member]

OK - first things first you need to amend the config as well update the master records.

However if you want to know how people use it and why they use it - the key to collections is the ability to contact the customer that is paying the debt.If you need to contact the branches to collect the cash then you should look at branch office collections.  If the customer pays centrally but has branches you dont need to activate the functionality to achieve this.

[Former Member]

Thanks for reply. I think I understand the config for it in collections. However, the issue as I see it is that Head Office/Branch is a relationship on the BSID/BSEG line level and if we set it up in FI, the old open items won't have the relationship in the line items. So the business is entertaining some kind of homegrown head office/branch relationship in the BP master. I don't think this is right because BP doesn't have company code and I'm not sure how that would flow to collections. Anyone ever seen that before ? It seems SAP's recommended approach is Head Office / Branch, but we don't want to re-post the open items just to get that relationship. It would impact cash application to have all new invoice numbers and lose the integration with SD billing docs. I can see there's a BADi to leverage Alternate Payer as the head payer in collections but we haven't tried to prototype that. Any complications with using Alt payer ? I'm really not sure what kind of code needs to go in that badi as I would've though that Alt Payer would flow to collections without coding. As always any advice is appreciated. Thanks,

Joe