CASE 1: When the Material in the purchase order belongs to a material type which makes quantity and value update in the receiving plant.
The goods receipt does not need a storage location. The goods we are receiving will be consumed immediately. These goods do not increase our warehouse stocks, therefore, the storage location is ignored by the system:
In the old transaction MB01 the storage location can be manually entered, but it is removed as soon as the data is adopted in the posting:
In the transaction MIGO the field is set to invisible as soon as the purchase order data is taken. It is not possible to enter any storage location since the field is not available:
Once the goods movement is posted and the material document is saved into the system, the stock is not increased, just as mentioned previously, so it is not possible to see the result of this receipt in the transaction MMBE for the stock overview.
Instead, the consumption will be increased. We will be able to see this consumption update in MM03, entering the Material and selecting a view that requires the Plant to be entered (the Purchasing view, for example):
In the Additional Data section we just need to access to the Consumption tab:
And we will see here our consumption figures.
CASE 2: When the Material in the purchase order belongs to a material type which makes no value update in the receiving plant.
What is the main difference with the previous case?
In the previous situation the account assignment was not mandatory in the Purchase Order.
We entered the account assignment in ME21N because we needed it for our specific business scenario, but it was never a mandatory field to be completed. Therefore, the presence of account assignment was used to decide whether the goods would be posted to consumption or to stock:
- If there is account assignment the goods go to consumption.
- If there is not account assignment the goods go to stock.
In this second case, however, this logic cannot be used: In this second case the account assignment is mandatory.
If we create in ME21N a purchase order for a non-valuated material (a material which belongs to the material type UNBW, for example) the system requests an account assignment. If this is not entered, an error message is sent:
"Account assignment mandatory for material TEST-BLOG-NON-VAL (enter acc. ***. cat.) - Message no. ME062".
Unless we complete the purchase order with an account assignment category and the corresponding account assignment data we will not be able to continue any further.
Therefore, since in this scenario the account assignment is mandatory, the system "does not know" if we want to post the material to consumption or to stock.
Now the presence of account assignment data cannot be used to differentiate between the two situations. Therefore, a decision was made here: In this situation the material always goes to stock.
Because the material will increase our warehouse stocks, a storage location is requested by the system when posting the goods receipt. If the storage location is not entered, the system sends the error message "Enter Stor. Location - Message no. M7018".
Therefore, in this scenario, a storage location is always mandatory even though we are posting a goods receipt for a purchase order with account assignment.
If then the material is to be consumed the needed consumption posting for this non-valuated material can be made with MB1A or MIGO_GI and the movement type 201, for example.
CASE 3: When the Material in the purchase order belongs to a material type which makes no value update in the receiving plant and the purchase order is an Intra-Company stock transport order.
This case is different from the previous one:
When we post a goods receipt for a stock transport order subject to account assignment, the system uses the quantity string MEU2, which will only update the Stock Transport Order (item history, statistics, etc.) and it will never update the stock.
The SAP Note 114685 explains this logic that dates back from the Release 3.1.:
"Cause and prerequisites
The posting logic for stock transport orders is standardized in Release 3.1. For purchase orders assigned to an account, basically no stock in transit is set up now independent of whether the material is valuated ornon-valuated and which account assignment category is used in the purchase order.
This change was necessary to allow a stock transfer between two plants with different valuation (the material type is valuated in one plant and non-valuated in the other plant)".