Introduction

This blog is going to tell you how to bill service contracts according to natural calendar months, quarters, half-years, or years in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

As of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2302.1, the following new settlement period rules are available for service contracts in your configuration environment:

• BILL0013: Monthly by Calendar (Settlement Period)
• BILL0014: Quarterly by Calendar (Settlement Period)
• BILL0015: Half-yearly by Calendar (Settlement Period)
• BILL0016: Yearly by Calendar (Settlement Period)

With these rules, your customer service manager can bill service contract items according to natural months, quarters, half-years, or years rather than bill for evenly divided durations.

Business Scenario

Previously in the Manage Service Contracts app …

When you choose the “Monthly” settlement period rule for example, the system divides settlement periods equally every month, starting from and ending on fixed days. In the example (service contract starts on March 7th 2023) below, the settlement period starts on the 7^th of every month and ends on the 6^th of the next month.

Fig.1 Monthly Settlement Period

Now in the Manage Service Contracts app …

If your business requires a different approach, like that of some of our customers who want to bill by natural months, quarters, half-years, or years, now you can use the new settlement period rules that we recently offer: Monthly/Quarterly/Half-yearly/Yearly by Calendar. That means the start and the end of settlement periods are always the first and the last day of the month/quarter/half-year/year as shown in the calendar. In the same example above, after you apply the new rule, the settlement start date is 1^st of every month except the first entry which depends on your contract start date. The settlement end date is 30^th or 31^st (28^th or 29^th in Feb) except the last entry which may differ depending on your contract end date.

Fig. 2 Monthly by Calendar

How To

To make these new rules visible in the Manage Service Contracts app, your configuration expert can go to the configuration environment and add them to your current date profile:

1. As a key user, you can go to the Manage Your Solution app to configure your solution.

Fig. 3 Configuration Your Solution

2. Go to the Date Management under Service -> General Settings. Click on Step 2 Define Date Profile for Service Transactions with the Configure action.

Fig. 4 Configuration Step

Note that if you use the SAP Central Business Configuration,  you can directly search for the configuration activity Define Date Profile for Service Transactions.

3. In the configuration step, you select your date profile for service contracts (for example the SAP delivered date profile (CONT002), and double click on the Date rules

Fig. 5 Date Rules for Date Profile

4. In the Date rules for your selected date profile, add new entries to the date profile. Using the value help, you can easily find the new date rules for billing to natural calendar already there available.

Fig. 6 Adding New Entry to Date Rule

Fig. 7 New Date Rules

5. Now a customer service manager can go to the Manage Service Contracts app to check the settlement period rules in the detail page of any service contract item.

Fig. 8 Settlement Period Rules in Manage Service Contracts App

Conclusion

In this blog, we explained how the new configuration settings help you bill service contracts according to natural calendar months, quarters, half-years, or years in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. We also demonstrated how to make the configuration settings visible in your Manage Service Contracts app.

If you have any questions about the topic, feel free to ask questions in Q&A forum of SAP Community or leave your comments below. 

Additional Information

For more information about service contracts, read our product assistance Manage Service Contracts in the SAP Help Portal.

For more information about service contract billing, read our product assistance Periodic Billing Plans for Service Contract Billing in the SAP Help Portal.

Relevant blog: How Periodic Billing Plan is Generated for Service Contract Items