534857304

Chapter 14 ■ Defining FI Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable
due. You owe money to vendors for goods and services received. Like a customer, a vendor falls under the
category of purchases and has a master record in the SAP system. Likewise, a vendor master record contains
information about a vendor account held in the database, which is applied to the accounting transactions.
Configuring accounts receivable and accounts payable entails several steps and can be confusing
if you’re not careful. We will be going through these steps systematically. First, we will take you through
configuring accounts receivable, and then you will learn how to configure accounts payable.
■■Note
There is no rule as to which account to configure first. Our decision to start with account receivables
is purely a matter of choice.
What Is a Customer Account Group?
Customer account groups allow you to classify customers into business partner functions that best fit the
nature of the business transaction. Customer account groups control the customer hierarchy containing the
customer master record. When a customer account is created, it is assigned to an account group. Normally,
an account group serves as a control mechanism that determines the relevant screens and fields to be
displayed for input during document entry. This is based on the individual customer’s business functions
and is maintained in the implementation guide (IMG).
The account group determines the fields displayed for input. You determine whether a field is
Required, Optional, or Displayed. When you specify that a field is required for input, the system will make
it compulsory to enter data into the field during document entry. For example, you can specify that the
customer number, name, and bank data must not be omitted during document entry. Mark information that
is not compulsory but may be needed as optional, and if you don’t want certain information to be entered
during document entry but you want to display the field, mark those fields as displayed or suppressed. You
can also hide the fields that you do not want to show by specifying their field status in the general data area.
Another benefit of customer account groups is that they assign a number range systematically for the
customer/vendor based on the business partner function. You will look at number range in depth later in
this chapter.
SAP provides a list of predefined account groups you can choose from instead of creating your own
account groups. The following list includes some of these important account group numbers and names:
• 0001 – Sold to party
• 0002 – Ship to party
• 0003 – Payer
• 0004 – Bill to third party
It’s best to use the standard account groups supplied by SAP instead of creating your own account
group. You should create an account group only if your company wants you to, in order to meet specific
requirements. This exercise teaches you how to create your own account groups from scratch.
■■Note
You can also define the screen layout for an account group per company code and per activity.
We don’t cover this process, as it’s beyond the scope of this chapter. We believe that the standard setting
supplied by SAP is sufficient.
204