Bank Determination for Supplier Payments

Overview

I’ve had several inquiries recently on the handling of supplier accounts where the supplier has multiple bank accounts in the master record and is requesting payment at a specific account on a per invoice basis. In all the cases, the payment is being made via an ACH or similar. The ask from the SAP community is how to handle this scenario using the standard functionality in SAP.

Scenarios

Here are some of the situations under which I have heard for this ask:

1. The supplier has multiple bank accounts which each represent a specific currency. They are requesting that payment according to an invoice currency to the respective bank currency.
2. A supplier has divided business and wishes accounting for a specific segment be remitted to a specific account.
3. The supplier has a collections or garnishment situation where specific part of their business is being remitted to an account.
4. An invoice has been factored or otherwise has been funded by another party who should ultimately receive the payment.

Solution Pathways

These requirements can be addressed in several ways. Many businesses have opted to generate a new supplier record for cases such as these. In doing so, the number of bank accounts on the supplier record remain at a count of one. However this practice results in an extreme duplication of supplier master data and ultimately drives data clean-up efforts. You’ll begin to see Purchase Orders issued to the incorrect supplier because the understanding of why a record was duplicated in the first place isn’t globally known. Furthermore, as you approach the usage of business partners more extensively in S/4HANA, you will be foregoing the power of having the supplier entity data consolidated.

A more common approach to these issues is to add an additional bank account to an existing supplier master record, after all the UI does permit this. These can be added with just the minimum bank account information, however by adding a distinguishing characteristic, the account as a whole can be interpreted in other screens/programs – most notably, the automatic payment program. The distinguishing characteristic is the Partner Bank Type (also known as the ID in S/4HANA). A very common process approach is to set the account with a user friendly identifier. For example, if you have an account for EUR or USD, set that as the identifier for the respective account.

Application

Vendor Master (XK01/02/02 of FK01/02/03)

Located in the Payment Transactions area of the vendor master. You will find the Bank Type field on the right side of the screen.

Invoice (FB60, MIRO, FB03/FB02)

The bank can then be assigned during invoice entry or as an update to a previously entered invoice.

If you assign it during the initial entry, you can locate the partner bank type on the Payment tab.

If you are updating a previously posted FI document, you will locate the document and select Additional Information to generate a pop-up with the partner bank type on the screen.

Additional Resources

If you would like to understand more about how a partner bank type is selected in the payment program: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/ERPFI/Selection+of+Partner+Bank+Type+%28BVTYP%29+From+Vendor+Master+Data+in+F110