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Anita_Ahmadpour
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
In this blog post, I would like to explain to you why the reprocessing rules in the area of bank statement processing and lockbox processing have been renamed to “processing rules”.

Note: Any screenshots in this blog post are taken from an SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 system. However, the UI of SAP S/4HANA (on-premise) systems is similar.

 

When you logged on to your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system after the latest release in August 2022, you might have noticed that the reprocessing rules are gone! And the Manage Bank Statement Reprocessing Rules app is not visible anymore. Don’t worry! We haven’t deleted the feature or the app. We have renamed them.

To explain why we renamed the rules and the app, we need to have a look at how the system processed bank statements when we created the feature of the reprocessing rules originally - and how the system processes bank statements now, after almost five years.

 

The original purpose of the reprocessing rules:


When we delivered the reprocessing rules and the Manage Bank Statement Reprocessing Rules app in our release of November 2018, the idea was that you could use reprocessing rules when the system did not manage to automatically post and clear bank statement items.

That means, in the original process, if a bank statement entered your system, the system used the interpretation algorithms and posting rules to process the bank statement items. If the system did not manage to process the items, you could go into the Reprocess Bank Statement Items app and either post and clear them manually or select a reprocessing rule to have the system post and clear the remaining unprocessed items.

In other words, only if the system did not manage to automatically process any items, could you use the reprocessing rules. The original purpose of the reprocessing rules was to process items after a failed attempt to automatically post and clear bank statement items. So, the rules were not used to process any items, but to reprocess the items that the system could not process automatically. Hence the name: reprocessing rules. And based on that, we named the app in which you could create, edit, delete, share, and automate the rules: Manage Bank Statement Reprocessing Rules.


Original Process


 

The changed process and the new purpose of the reprocessing rules:


In the course of the last releases and years, this process has changed, though. Now, the process consists of two processing phases when bank statement items enter the system.

In a nutshell, what happens in the first processing phase is that the system looks for matching open items based on posting rules and interpretation algorithms. In the second processing phase, the system looks for automated reprocessing rules whose conditions match the bank statement items. That means, the system looks for reprocessing rules that could process the bank statement items. After these two processing phases comes the posting phase. If the system has found a reprocessing rule with matching conditions, it processes the item using the actions defined in the reprocessing rule (usually, instructions on how to post and clear the items). If the system does not find any reprocessing rule with matching conditions, it uses the results of the first processing phase. That means, the system posts the bank statement items and clears the open items it has found based on the interpretation algorithms and posting rules it used in the first processing phase. If the system cannot use any matching open items to post the bank statement items, it stops the automatic processing of the bank statement items. In this case, you can view the respective bank statement items in the Reprocess Bank Statement Items app where you can manually reprocess them. For a more detailed description of this process, see Overview on Automatic Bank Statement Processing.

Basically, the reprocessing rules are not only used to reprocess items after a failed first attempt of automatic processing. In this changed process, they are already used at the very beginning to post bank statement items and clear open items. We came to the conclusion that their name “reprocessing rule” did not reflect their true purpose anymore. Therefore, we have renamed the reprocessing rules to processing rules because they are rules that the system uses to process bank statement items and lockbox items. In this context, we have also renamed the Manage Bank Statement Reprocessing Rules app to Manage Processing Rules for Bank Statements.

Note: We have also delivered the equivalent app for lockbox processing: the Manage Processing Rules for Lockbox app.


Screenshot of SAP Fiori launchpad of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 release


Go on! Log on to your system, open the Manage Processing Rules app, and have a look at your processing rules.

 

Do you want more information?


For more information on bank statement processing, lockbox processing, and processing rules, have a look at the following links:

Do you have any questions or comments?


If you have any questions, any feedback or comments, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!
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