Payments with Payment Requests and Repetitive Codes

Introduction

Payments in SAP is a very important topic. Most often these are payments made to vendors. There are multiple ways how you can pay vendors in SAP using invoices or down payment requests.

Some special cases require you to make payments without an invoice, and Payment Requests become handy in these cases. If these are one-off payments, you can create and approve payment request, like discussed in this article.

There are also some types of payments that need to be done the same way from time to time. Say, money transfers between the banks. Of course, you can still create individual payment requests for each of them, but there is another tool that simplifies the business process and reduces the possibility of making an error, for example a typo. This tool is called Repetitive Codes. Let’s see how these are set up in SAP.

Setting up payment methods

Of course, you need to start with setting up payment methods in the country and in the Company Code – same way as for regular vendor payments. Just to mention that if you are going to use BCM (Bank Communication Manager) for the approval process, you still need to assign a PMW (Payment medium workbench) file generation tool to the payment method in question.

You may wish to set up separate payment methods for repetitive payments and for regular vendor payments, but that is just an option, not a requirement.

Setting up GL account determination for outgoing part

There is a special place in SAP IMG (Implementation Guide) where you need to set up GL account assignment for your payment methods that will be used for Repetitive Payments with Payment requests. This is done in IMG node

• Financial Accounting (New)
• Bank Accounting
• Business Transactions
• Payment Transactions
• Payment Handling
• Bank Clearing Account Determination
• Define Account Determination

You also need to check that configuration of the GL account assignment is consistent for Payment Requests and for vendor payments. There is an IMG node located just next to the IMG node mentioned above. Report RFFMB001 does the same check too.

There are some other configuration transaction located near the node above. Check if they are relevant to your case, for example you may need to define number ranges.

Setting up GL account determination for incoming part

When you do a bank to bank transfer you need to set up offsetting GL account for the accounting posting, for example clearing account for incoming payments on recipient bank. This is done in IMG node

• Financial Accounting (New)
• Bank Accounting
• Business Transactions
• Payment Transactions
• Payment Request
• Define Clearing Accts for Receiving Bank for Acct. Transfer

Setting up Repetitive codes

The final part of setting up the process is a definition of Repetitive Codes for payments. This is done in transaction OT81.

Here you set up payer and payee parts of the bank to bank transfer, assign payment currency and payment method, and even assign the bank chain if necessary.

If you populate Reference Text field there, you remember that asterisk in the first position will allow you to copy the text to the accounting document and also to the payment file. You can read more about automatic field copying in a separate article by SAP Expert.

You can set up groups of repetitive codes too, if you want to use this feature.

Repetitive Codes should be created in each client individually, they are not a part of SAP transport system.

Do not forget to release the Repetitive Code, otherwise you will not be able to use it in the process.

Optional BCM configuration

If you are going to use the approval cycle in Bank Communication Management for your repetitive payments, you need to define payment run IDs as relevant to BCM. Run transaction OBPM5, and use the FI-BL button there to create a list of relevant run IDs.

Creation of payment requests

When all the configuration is done, you need to test your scenarios. Start from creation of payment requests in transaction FRFT_B. Put your filtering criteria in the Selection Condition part of the screen, for example Company Code or grouping parameter. You can leave filter empty to see the full list of existing repetitive codes.

Populate posting date for payment request and for payment run (if you are going to run it directly from FRFT_B), and then put the amount of your bank to bank transfer payment request in the corresponding field.

Pressing the Create Payment Request button will do exactly the same: payment request will be saved in the system. It will appear in the lower part of the screen. You still need to release it for payment using the buttons provided.

If you want to create payment straight from FRFT_B, you can still do so using the Pay button. But remember that payment run ID generated by automatic process may not be the same as assigned to BCM approval configuration. It may also be a good idea to separate steps for the segregation of duties purposes. Otherwise you can define your own Payment Run ID in the following step.

Payment program F111.

If you run payment program separately, you need to use transaction F111 (not F110) to process payment requests.

The general idea of F110 and F111 use is very similar, although the screens and buttons may look slightly different. I will not discuss the functionality of F111 here, but I’ll only mention that if you want to limit the selection of data by certain payment request ID, you can do so in Dynamic Selections. There is a special field Key Number in the section Payment Requests.

Once you finish with payment run and BCM approval cycle, your payment file will be created ready to transfer to the bank.

Of course, it is a good idea to run through all the testing that is relevant for payments.

I hope you will be able to successfully implement the Repetitive Codes functionality in your SAP system. If you still have questions, why not ask SAP Expert?