SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management and Utilities – Case 2: Grid Fee

In my introduction post I described the flexible possibilities of integration between BRIM (CI more in particular) and Utilities.  Over the next few weeks, I will show some demo use cases I created for customers to highlight the flexibility of BRIM.

The second case treats the following situation: the commodity part of the invoice is calculated by the supplier, but certain costs (as we call them the Grid Fee costs) are calculated by the DGO and sent to the supplier.  The supplier can recalculate these values himself (with the risk of errors) or he can try to integrate the data received from the DGO smoothly on the ISU invoice.

In this blog, you will find some customizing snippets to show how the integration between ISU and Convergent Invoicing is done, and at the end you will find the demo screens.

Customizing Snippets

Billable Item Class

As for consumption item classes, the billable item class can be generated by activating the right interfaces four our scenario.  In this case, I want the following specific activated:

• Billing Quantity: using this interface, I can now store the billed quantity and unit of measure as extra fields
• Target Process: with this I can define the target process for invoicing. As here I want to invoice in ISU, this is required to be able to indicate the target.

Target Process

This customizing can be found under Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable->Convergent Invoicing->Integration->External Invoicing. In the first step, you can see the available Target Processes.

Once activated (in step ‘Activate Target Process’) you can choose if you link your Billable Item Class to a Target Process or if you assign the Target Process based on Source Document Category and/or Source Document Type.  In my example, I chose to assign my specific Billable Item Class to Target Process ISU1.

Invoice Line Item Types

As many Utilities Print Workbench developments use the Line Item Types to determine the description and the characteristics of the billable line, we want to integrate the line item type in Convergent Invoicing, and transfer it to ISU.

On one side, we will create and link the Billing Item Types in CI under Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable->Convergent Invoicing->Billing->Billing Processes->Define/Assign Billing Item Types.

This is the definition part

This is the assign part

On the other side, we now want to link this CI item type with an ISU Line Item Type.  This is done under Sap Utilities->Invoicing->Integration With Convergent Invoicing->Assign Types Of Line Item To Types Of Invoicing Item.  The Items on the right are the ISU Line Item Types.

Demo screens

Initial situation

After receiving the grid fee from the market, there are two billable items.  The target process is filled in automatically at creation and there is a possibility to enter a quantity and an amount.

Billing and invoicing in CI

Now when the billing is performed in CI, these fields are taken over in the billing document.  Off course you will NOT be able to invoice this billing document via CI.  The invoicing transaction will return an empty selection.

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Invoicing in ISU

Now we can do the invoicing in ISU. Based on the Invoicing Process Selection Control the documents that were defined in customizing will be selected to be invoiced together with the ISU invoice.  Following screen is from EAINV_MON transaction.  Once finished, the ISU Invoicing will create the CI invoice document, and integrate the Line Items on the ISU Print Document.  It is important to know that a seperate FICA document is created for posting the CI invoice document.

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Conclusion

This wraps up the second case of BRIM handling. It shows how easy it is to integrate the GridFee with the ISU invoice. Do not hesitate to share your ideas in the comments!