New Payment Purpose in SAP Business ByDesign

This blog will give you a short introduction into the new Payment Purposes becoming available with release 2208 in SAP Business ByDesign.

Why “New Payment Purposes”?
In the past, the payment purpose could already be included into Treasury Intelligency Solutions (TIS) file generation based on supplier master data. But with certain architectural boundaries from the past, we were reaching the limits and could not open it up for generic usage. Thus with this release, we are providing a new version of the payment purpose, which will be replacing the old payment purpose limited to TIS integration and opening a way for a more flexible usage in the future.

So, what are Payment Purposes?
Payment purposes, or payment purpose codes as they are also called, are used to provide banks with certain information about the reason of a financial transfer.
This can be to comply with local regulatory reporting requirements, especially for cross-border money transfers, but can also apply to money transfers within the same country/region, or even within certain bank groups.
Typical examples are e.g. salary payments or capital formation savings payments.

How and where can you already use the new payment purposes?
As the new payment purposes are replacing the former ones used for TIS integration, they of course can be used for TIS integration. And we are also enabling it as well for the Switzerland ISO20022 payment format.

1. Configuration of payment purposes
   Once activated via Scoping, you can use BC Fine-Tune activity “Payment Purposes” for maintaining the payment purposes you need for your payments. Note that when a payment purpose is flagged as obsolete, this payment purpose will not be available for usage when maintaining master data or transactional data.
2. Usage of payment purpose during payment processing
   When creating payments of type “Outgoing Bank Transfer” or “Outgoing Wire Transfer”, in the detailed view you can find the new field Payment Purpose.
   

   Payment Purpose field on Outgoing Bank Transfer

   If filled, this payment purpose will then be taken over into the payment file generation and be placed according to the file format’s requirement. As mentioned, with 2208 we are supporting TIS file generation (format “SAP COLL PAYORDREQ XML Payment”) and the CH ISO20022 format. For TIS file generation, you should see no visible change. For CH ISO20022 format, the tag <RgltryRptg> will be filled as shown in following screenshot, with the country being determined based on the bank receiving the money:
   

3. Defaulting of payment purpose into transactional data
   Always or most of the time using the same payment purpose for payments to a certain supplier? Then use the defaulting logic by maintaining the payment purpose on the supplier master data – and the payment purpose will get prefilled automatically for your payments, with you of course having the chance to overwrite this defaulting during payment creation.

Have already been using the “old payment purpose” for TIS integration?
Don’t worry, we are not making a hard cut directly with this release, though we are planning to remove the “old payment purpose” field in supplier financial master data in future releases. Nonetheless it’s recommended to start switching to the new payment purpose which in the long run will be giving you more functionality as compared to the past.
This means scoping the “new payment purposes”, configuring them according to your needs – and once you are prepared, via a special scoping question in business configuration, you can activate the new payment purpose field on payments getting taken over into the TIS file generation.
Depending on how often you are sending your batches to TIS, it’s advisable to already start filling the payment purpose field when creating payment transactions. Because once the special scoping question for TIS file inclusion is scoped, the system will then evaluate the payment purpose field from these payment transactions and will not take it anymore from the “old payment purpose” field from the supplier master data.
So with this special scoping question, we are giving you the option to prepare at your own speed and decide when you are ready to use the new functionality also with the TIS file generation.

Got interested for more details on this topic? Check the new/updated SAP Business ByDesign Library sections
Maintain Payment Purpose for Payment Processing
Business Data for Treasury Intelligence Solutions Integration

And keep your eyes open for more to come to round off this new functionality in future releases.