Understanding the bank statement process in SAP

Bank statement is the document that bank sends to your company to update you about the balances and transactions on the bank account that the company holds in that bank.

You can receive that statement in various ways. Of course, you need to process these statements in SAP to reflect the bank account transactions. That’s the accounting rule. The way how you process the statement depends on the format you get the statement in. Generally speaking, there are three ways to enter statement in SAP:

1. Electronic bank statement (EBS). If your bank sends the statement in the format of electronic file, you can import that file using the special tools. Usually you run transaction FF_5 or FF.5 to import such bank statement. There are various bank statement formats available for automatic processing by SAP. There is also a converter tool in transaction DMEE that allows you to convert your bespoke format to a Multicash file acceptable by SAP.
2. Manual bank statement (MBS). If you get your statement in a paper format or the format that cannot be automatically imported into SAP, you have an option to enter the statement details manually using the SAP transaction FF67.
3. Manual postings. This means you enter the statement transactions using the non-banking system tools, for example F-53, F-28 or FB01.

If you process the statement using the EBS or MBS processes, you can review the statement using the transaction FEBAN. First of all, we need to remember that there are two FEBAN transactions in SAP: old (classic) is covered below. New FEBAN is another transaction for the bank statement process. You can read more about it here.

Transaction FEBAN (classic) gives you an option to see the statements in a tree format where House Bank, House Bank Account and Statement number are the nodes and individual transactions are the end leaves. Once you click the leaf, the right part of the screen shows the details of the transaction. In particular, it gives you an overview of posting status for the statement item.

What can you see there?

To start with, there are two postings areas. They represent two parts of the banking transactions as you configure them: banking and sub-ledger areas. You can have postings in one or both areas, depending on how you configure your statements. Effectively, you can have different contents in each part of the FEBAN screen.

There are two fields where document numbers can be found in each posting area: Document and Payment on Account

Document number is filled with a proper number if your statement is successfully posted on-line and your transaction is configured to be either without clearing, or with clearing and that clearing was successful. That is valid, for example, when your Bank Statement is properly integrated with the payment process.

Payment on Account field is filled with a document number if you asked system to run a clearing transaction, but clearing was not successful. You can control whether or not “payment on account” is possible by providing the posting key in the “Posting on account” field of the Posting Rule configuration. Additional control is the checkbox “No automatic clearing” in the assignment of bank accounts to transaction types in the EBS configuration.

Other than actual document numbers, the Document number field may contain technical values:

1. Blank value means that the posting area hasn’t been processed yet. You can initiate this process by clicking the “Save” button on the FEBAN screen. This process is called “online post-processing”. If your post-processing is successful, it will update the document number in FEBAN.
2. Dash (“-“) means that the posting area is not relevant to the statement item by the Posting Rule configuration.
3. Asterisk (“*”) means that document generation was not requested when the statement was entered. For example, you could request system to generate a batch input session with posting transactions. You can do it either via a radiobutton on FF_5 selection screen for Electronic Bank Statement, or in Specifications for Manual Bank Statement FF67. This is an off-line post-processing of bank statement.

If you have a document number in any of these fields in any Posting Area, you can double-click it and see the document itself.

Unfortunately, there is no option to drill-down to the document number if the statement was posted off-line, even if the document has been actually posted after the statement upload.

You can also read more about EBS configuration in the Free e-book by SAP Expert.

Do you use statement upload functionality in your company?