Introduction to Central Payments
When Central Payment is activated for a specific company code, open-item processing of all customer and vendor accounts for this company code is moved entirely to the Central Finance system.
Open items in the relevant customer and vendor accounts are replicated from one or more source system(s) to the Central Finance system. All subsequent processes based on customer/vendor open items then have to take place in the Central Finance system.
Key features:
- Activated at company code level.
- For company codes that are activated for central payment, the invoices posted in the source systems are technically cleared. The invoices are replicated to the Central Finance system and are paid there.
- For company codes that are not activated for central payment, the invoices posted in source systems stay open and are paid in the source systems. The invoices and payment or clearing documents are replicated to the Central Finance system for reporting purpose. The replicated invoices are ruled out from the payment.
Benefits of Central Payment
- Central open item management and reporting
- Cross-system view of customer or vendor accounts
- Real-time operational reporting with Fiori user experience
- Centralized process know-how in shared service center
- Standardize payment processes
- Centralized A/R processes like cash application, credit exposure calculations, dunning, collections prioritization
- Reduce costs of bank connections
- Use SAP Standard interface for uploading bank statements to a central platform
- Monitoring of bank communications and transactions
- HANA optimization of payment proposal generation
- Integration of SAP Cloud Platform with latest SAP Apps for AR processes
- Integration of Digital Payments
There is lot of information available on Central payments so I will not talk much about the same. The focus of this blog is to understand implementing Central Payments where we have Non SAP systems as source systems. When source is SAP ECC then standard SAP configuration takes care of the process.
View this video to learn more about Central Payments:
Central Payments with Third Party source systems
One you implement this note – 2597587, the payment of a third-party’s company code will never be restricted in Central Finance system, hence double-payment from source system(s) and Central Finance system might be possible. Therefore, customer needs to limit the payment transactions from business perspective
When the source is Non SAP and the invoice is replicated to SAP S/4HANA via Central Finance and Central Payments is active in CFIN then the invoice is posted as open for payment in both systems . Now we need to ensure that double payment should not happen.
To avoid this we have to do some extra steps in the process. Once the invoice is replicated to S/4HANA then it should be blocked in Non SAP system (via some feed from CFIN).
And when payment is completed from CFIN then the payment document information can be sent back to Non SAP system to have complete information in source system too as the operational/Entity level reporting may be done from source system itself. This will be the optional step based on customer requirement.
Important SAP Notes:
There are a few notes to be followed which are updated frequently:
2346233 – Central Payment for SAP Central Finance: Pilot Note for Activation of Central Payment
2292043 – Central Finance: Enable Clearing Transfer in Source System
2623514 – Central Finance and Withholding Tax SAP Notes
2509047 – Central Finance: Required SAP Notes to support Tax Reporting out of the Central Finance System
2184567 – Central Finance: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
2474760 – Central Payment: SD Down Payments
2654572 – Handling of Legacy Open Items
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Hope you enjoy reading.
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