<span id="lblNoFrames"><h1>InsideSAP_issue7_Jan10.pdf</h1><br/>continued on page 39 >> column ] FI/CO >Simplifying third party settlement By Joel Stehr Are you the middleman, oncharging vendor invoices to your customers? Do you process complex vendor or customer invoices with discounts, surcharges or rebates? Or do you have external systems interfacing fi nancial transactions to a back-end SAP system? Agency Business is one of the lesserknown modules that has managed to escape notice, despite being easily found under the Logistics menu in SAP. Most have never heard of it, so it’s not surprising that it is rarely implemented, despite lending itself to a vast number of different applications. Agency Business was included for the fi rst time in v4.5A to support third party settlement processes. Essentially, this refers to any process whereby a company manages the fi nancial component of a transaction between vendors and customers with no impact on stock or stock holding. While information regarding materials can be entered, it is for pricing and reporting purposes only. Think of an accountant or solicitor that incurs charges on your behalf by procuring services or products required to carry out their duties. They will on-charge these invoices to you. Agency Business facilitates this process of on-charging in a single transaction – the user enters the vendor invoice and the customer details. When posted, the system creates a vendor accounting document and a customer accounting document. There is no updating of stock because the stock never actually hits your balance sheet. All the logistics are typically worked out directly between your vendor and customer. One of the key features of Agency Business is the ability to use complex MM or SD pricing to determine vendor and customer prices, discounts, surcharges and rebates – Agency Business is fully integrated with both MM and SD rebate management. These chargethrough-style transactions are frequently found in buying groups, co-ops, franchisers, importer/exporters, retail companies acting as agents, fi nance institutions offering factoring services, card handling companies and brokers, to name but a few. While chargethrough transactions are the forte of Agency Business, overall fl exibility has been vastly improved with the release of the latest Enhancement Packs. As a result, it is now possible to process one-sided documents – rather than specifying both a vendor and customer, the user can specify just a vendor or just a customer. What’s the benefi t of these onesided transactions? It means that, on the MM side, Agency Business allows for processing of a stand-alone vendor invoice with the application of pricing conditions without the need for a purchase order. On the SD side, it means a customer invoice can be created with pricing conditions in a single transaction (as opposed to creating a debit memo request and a debit memo in SD). All of this means it is now possible to process chargethrough invoices, vendor invoices, customer invoices and GL postings using a single transaction, just by having different document types set up to cater for each scenario. So how can Agency Business lower your costs? The key savings are associated with processing of vendor or customer invoices. If you’re on-charging vendor invoices to customers currently, there’s a good chance there are a few steps involved, some of them manual. Perhaps even an Excel spreadsheet for tracking? Which is easy to forget to update, meaning there’s potential for invoices not to be on-charged. If you charge a processing fee on top, it means not only are you not recovering costs, you’re also missing out on revenue. Using Agency Business, your multi-step manual process becomes an automated single-step process. In terms of vendor or customer invoices, savings can be realised in not only processing time but also accuracy. Given the ability to use MM/SD pricing conditions, users can either enter these manually or they can be maintained in advance, with the system automatically determining appropriate GL accounts via standard MM account determination – all this instead of an accounts clerk either manually calculating discounts >> the independent magazine for SAP professionals <<[ ]37</span>