Pooled Payment, Central Billing and Payment Card handling as main variants.
Some enterprises face complex and high volume financial settlement scenarios between their suppliers and customers. A huge amount of incoming invoices of suppliers multiplies themselves by numerous customers. Apparently it is not be reasonable for a customer to pay invoice by invoice separately as well as it is not reasonable for a supplier to be paid invoice by invoice. Customers and suppliers would benefit from a streamlined and optimized settlement process that reduces their overall TCO significantly.
Many SAP customers in Europe use this grievance and offer collaborative financial settlement processes such as pooled payment, central billing or payment card handling. In the following picture one variant of the pooled payment process is shown. Its main characteristic is that the payment agent is not the owner of the claim resp. receivable. He just forwards the payment request. In opposite to this process the payment agent in a central billing process owns the claim.
Furthermore another process variant is implemented in some enterprises to handle payment cards or credit cards.
A special clearing workbench offers the opportunity to clear point of sale payment transactions with later incoming invoices as shown in the following picture.
A complaint workbench allows customers to track settlement documents resp. invoices and place complaints if necessary. Complaints can be created interactively in response to invoices and a communication process with the employee of the payment agent in the backend is recorded. Technically SAP provides a webdynpro to be integrated in any portal or browser so that it can be accessed flexibly.
On the one hand these financial services are chargeable services for suppliers and/or customers as a business model or are used by large companies for the internal process optimization of financial flows between suppliers and branches.
The benefits are significant. The underlying SAP ERP engine Agency Business can easily leveraged for existing SAP customers without any additional license fees. New customers can deployed this engine without implementing underlying logistical processes as prerequisite. Implementation cycles might last from 6 weeks shortest up to one year in the average.
Would you be interested in a financial service offering for your suppliers and customers?
