Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

Delivery costs such as freight, customs, duty, and so on, can be planned on a purchase order so that an accrual is created when that order is goods received. This accrual is posted to an account that is separate from the Goods receipt Invoice receipt (GR/IR) account so that the relevant costs can be tracked separately from the cost of the product. When an invoice is received to match these planned delivery costs, it is a common scenario that the vendor that sends the invoice is different from the one that the product is bought from. For this reason, it is important to know the options for posting these invoices to a different vendor to the one that is proposed from the purchase order.

When you are matching a delivery cost invoice with the purchase order (using transaction MIRO), you need to make sure that you have the correct “Items Indicator” in the transaction (this is the drop-down field on the extreme right of the transaction screen, right above the “Layout” field). There are 3 possible settings:

• Goods/Service Items: Choosing this indicator will display the lines that refer to the product(s) purchased. This is used where the invoice you are posting is from the product vendor and does not include any delivery costs;
• Planned Delivery Costs: Choosing this indicator will display the planned delivery cost lines. This is used where the invoice you are posting is from the planned delivery costs vendor;
• Goods/Service Items + Planned Delivery Costs: Choosing this indicator will display both the lines for the product purchased and the planned delivery cost. This is used where the invoice you are posting is from the product vendor and includes planned delivery costs;

Note that whichever setting you choose will be the default setting for the next time you use the transaction. You therefore need to be aware of the setting before you make a new posting, because you may for example, think that a purchase order does not contain any planned delivery costs (even though it does) because the relevant lines do not appear due to the setting “Goods/Service Items” being set.

You need to choose the “Planned Delivery Costs” indicator when you are posting delivery costs from a different vendor. However, this will not automatically propose the delivery costs vendor in the invoice posting. The system will propose the product vendor (or more accurately, the Invoicing Party in the Purchase Order). Since the purchase order can only have one invoicing party, you cannot set both the product and the delivery cost vendors as invoicing parties. You therefore have two options:

(1) Change the Invoicing Party in transaction MIRO: to do this, you need to go to the “Details” tab of the transaction, and in the “Inv. Party” field, enter the account number of the delivery costs vendor. When you hit the enter key, you will notice that the proposed vendor is now the delivery costs vendor. You can then carry out the posting as normal. This option is carried out by the finance team, and they therefore need to be careful not to post the invoice to the product vendor when they receive a delivery cost invoice from a different vendor.

(2) Set the delivery costs vendor in the condition of the purchase order: When the delivery cost condition is entered in the purchase order, you can select the condition line and click on the “Condition Detail” button (which looks like a magnifying glass) and enter the delivery cost vendor in the “Vendor” line of the ensuing screen. This way, when the finance team selects the “Planned Delivery Costs” indicator, the delivery cost vendor will be proposed as the invoicing party.

Note that you can also enter the delivery costs vendor at the goods receipt stage. To do this you need to enable the setting in the condition type of the delivery cost. Go to transaction M/06 and in the 'Control Data 2' section change the "Vendor in GR" field to "1" (Entry possible if vendor not maintained) or "2" (Entry always possible).

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

Enabling ‘multiple account assignment’ functionality is very useful as it enables you to split an individual line on a purchase order or purchase requisition into multiple account assignments. This means that you can enter several cost centers on a single line of a purchasing document and choose a method for distributing the purchasing cost among the cost centers. The distribution method could either be on a quantity or percentage basis and this is specified in the “Account Assignment” tab of the purchase order line item. To set up the functionality for multiple account assignments, you need to go transaction OME9 or the following configuration menu path:

Materials Management -> Purchasing -> Account Assignment -> Maintain Account Assignment Categories

You can then double-click on the account assignment category that you want to enable for multiple account assignments and in the field ‘ID: AcctAssgt Scrn’, set the indicator to “2 - Multiple account assignment”.

One issue that occurs when you make this setting is that the purchase document will become “GR Non-valuated”. You can see proof of this by going to the “Delivery” tab of the purchase order line item and you will see that the checkbox “GR Non-Valuated” has been checked.  This means that when you perform a goods receipt on the purchase order (transaction MIGO), no value will be posted to financial accounting. The only time a value will be posted is when you perform the invoice verification process (transaction MIRO). In cases where the invoice arrives in a different month from the goods, you could therefore understate your current liabilities for the period.

The bad news is that if you are not on release ERP 6.0 (from Enhancement Pack 4 upwards) there is no standard solution to this issue. If however, you are on that release and enhancement pack, you can activate the business function “LOG_MM_MAA_1”. To do this you need to go to the configuration menu (SPRO) and follow the path:

SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> Activate Business Functions

You can then highlight the business function “LOG_MM_MAA_1” and hit the “Activate Changes” button and hit the “save” button to save your changes. The next time you create a purchase requisition or purchase order you will notice three major changes:

(1)    For the account assignment category that you have enabled with “multiple account assignment” functionality, the purchase order line item can be GR-Valuated (meaning that the checkbox “GR Non-Valuated” will not be activated and goods receipt of that line will pass a value to Financial Accounting);

(2)    You will be able to enter amounts into the account assignment lines in the “Account Assignment” tab of the purchase order line item. Previously, you were only able to distribute the line item amount into the account assignments according to percentages or quantities.

(3)    You will be able to use the multiple account assignment functionality for delivery costs. This means that if you enter (say) a freight condition cost on the line item of a purchase order, this cost will also be distributed to the account assignment items according to the same logic that was used to split the product items.

For more infrormation on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.