Sales orders with future delivery dates

[Former Member]

Hi All

There is a field for delivery dates while creating sales orders , in my company most of our services will be provided in the future but we have to invoice the customers in order to receive the payments before providing the service.

What we do know is recognizing the income in the current period"when we convert the sales order into billing" then later on and before close of period we defer the income.

In this case delivery date is useless , is there anyway to give SAP the future delivery date and during the billing the system post the transaction to Balance sheet account and when delivery date become due automatically the system transfer it to income account.

[Lakshmipathi]

From your post, what my understanding is the business process is offering some service for which you want to bill.  If this is the case, then it is order related billing and not sure why you bother about delivery date ??  Needless to mention, with standard configuration, system will allow you to generate commercial invoice before PGI, if the scenario involves delivery related billing.

G. Lakshmipathi

[VeselinaPeykova]

Probably I failed to understand your business case. If you are delivering only services, why you are referring to delivery dates at all - the important dates are your billing dates and service render dates.

What is the problem with using the advance payment scenario - the customer places an order, you create a proforma document out of it (it has no financial impact) and state the amount that he should post to the company account referencing the order. The customer sends the money via bank transfer (you can post it with special G/L indicator), then you perform services or provide products, create billing and clear against the item for advance payment. For sure, you just need to clarify what to do with differences, if such are possible, between advance payment and actual invoiced amount - leave as customer balance or send money back. Also if advance payment occurs in a different month than the fiscal invoice, in some countries you need to re-post manually because of VAT - probably a legal consultant can advise you on that.

If you actually need to use revenue recognition, you are probably aware that this functionality is activated in a special way after communicating your processes to SAP and getting permission from them as explained in sap note 782758. There is also very good documentation on best practices for Revenue Recognition available in note 1172799, which you might want to check in case you want to recognize revenue in different periods.