20.08.2014

Grou­ping SAP® FI ven­dor line items

Today I will give you a little hint which will make it easier for you to navigate in long lists of SAP® vendor financial transactions.

A common SAP® transaction code is “FBL1n”. It allows you to display financial vendor line items in a list.

SAP® T-Code FBL1n „Vendor Line Item Display“

You can restrict that list by several parameters, for example to list only open, or only cleared or all items for a certain vendor. You can limit the list according to a certain vendor, time range or company code as well.

Vendor line item display FBL1n – Selecting „All items“

When listing “All items” for an important vendor, the list display can get a little bit confusing: As it contains a wide range of different transaction types, like for example invoices, credit notes or payments, it is difficult to tell at a glance which transactions belong together - especially if it is more complex than a “One invoice – One outgoing payment” scenario.

Vendor line item display FBL1n – Which transactions belog together?

The trick is to go to the menu bar at „Environment“ and select „Clearing transactions“:

Menu – Environment – Clearing transactions

This option now restructures the list, making it a bit easier on the eyes, as business transactions which are linked are grouped together. The “One invoice – One outgoing payment” scenarios can be spotted at a glance as highlighted in the following screenshot…

One invoice – one payment

… but also more complex constellations can be identified – and understood – a lot easier, for example the following group of five transactions, which consists of three invoices and two payments.

Even complex combinations are getting more obvious

We probably would have expected to find this in two different groups: The first one containing the invoice and payment of 31k Euros, the second group containing the two invoices (4k+5k) and the one payment of 9k.

Double-clicking allows us to drill down into the transactions. It shows that the three invoices AND one manual payment of 31k Euros have been cleared by a outgoing payment run transaction of 9k on 27th of October:

Potential Manual Payment, entered with SAP® T-Code FB01

This is the first payment, probably a down payment. It was entered manually using T-Code FB01, and not initiated by the automated payment run, which would have been T-Code F110. Let’s compare it to the final clearing transaction:

Payment triggered by SAP® payment run, T-Code F110

This is the second payment, which has been performed by the automated payment run. Only by this transaction, all four predecessors (3 invoices minus 1 potential manual down payment) were finally cleared.

Without grouping the line items, constellations like that are hard to spot. If you have not been aware of this menu option before, it will make your SAP® data analytic life a lot easier when looking at financial transactions for vendors.

By the way, the topic of “Manual Payments” is an interesting one! I will have a more detailed look at it later on this year.

For any comments on this article, feel free to write us at info@dab-gmbh.de 

To contact the author you can also use LinkedIn or XING (you may have to login first before you can access these links).

LinkedIn: http://de.linkedin.com/pub/stefan-wenig/54/1b8/b30

XING: https://www.xing.com/profile/Stefan_Wenig2?sc_o=mxb_p


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