1. Receivables Management – Introduction

Receivables Management in line with its title is self-explanatory. In SAP S/4 HANA enterprise management it enhances management of Accounts Receivables. Incoming cash flow from sales is the heartbeat of every organization. Managing this sales cash flow is effort an intensive process and often complex.

Receivables Management (RM) has excellent system functions to evaluate a Business Partners credit situation before a sale is initiated. It also allows proactively managing delayed payments. It streamlines management of disputes in the Business Partner’s sales invoices. It ultimately reduces Days sales outstanding (DSO), improves the working capital. Assists in lowering operating costs and minimize bad debt and write-offs. In the earlier SAP ECC 6.0, RM was referred to as Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM).

Source: SAP
1.1 Document scope

This document attempts to explain the Collection and Dispute management related business functions that are available in SAP S/4 HANA Enterprise management.

2. Dispute Management

Dispute Management is a part of Receivables Management in the SAP S/4 HANA Enterprise management.

• It facilitates effective management of Disputes and better service to Business partners (BP)
• Within SAP S/4 HANA Enterprise management it has standard ingratiation with Collections Management, Accounts Receivables and the Banking applications.

2.1 Creation of a Dispute

In S/4 HANA Enterprise management the dispute records are created from the process receivables APP

Here the disputes can be recorded against respective Invoice(s).

2.2 Processing and Resolution of a Dispute

In S/4 HANA Enterprise management the dispute records are processed from the below APP

• Dispute Case processing
• Manage Dispute cases

The apps take us to a list of Dispute cases. Each case can be individually accessed and process from here.

There are analytical APPs what can be used by supervisory personnel

S/4 HANA dispute management retains all the workflow functions from ECC 6. Apart from these there are native mechanisms to email the BP at each step. When the Dispute record is created, escalated, resolved etc.

2.3 Dispute Escalation and Closure

In S/4 HANA Enterprise management the dispute escalation and closure is no different from how it was done in ECC 6.

• When the dispute processor is still not able to resolve it by the deadline date the system automatically escalates the same to the Dispute owner.
• Disputes can be manually voided when the BP accepts closure.
• Otherwise when there is no outstanding amount (100% payments, residual amount cleared / adjusted with credit memos etc..) the S/4 HANA Enterprise management system automatically closes the dispute.

3. Conclusion

Dispute Management in S/4 HANA is definitely a very intuitive solution. The user experience with the UX FIORI apps are impeccable, same is the experience with real-time time analytics in the same system. The integration within the other areas like collection management is definitely commendable.