ABAP_to_the_Future

Locating Code that Can Be Pushed Down 15.4
30 days after the end of the month in which the invoice date falls. However, some
customers go bankrupt and thus cannot pay the invoice; in SAP terms, the customer
open item must be classified as a bad debt. An accountant (e.g., Igor) has to
clear the open item by writing off the debt from the balance sheet and charging it
to the profit and loss section of the accounts.
To make matters worse for the custome r (as if going bankrupt was not bad
enough), the baron presses a button on his control panel, and the monster delivered
to the customer goes into a frenzy, destroying everything in sight and then
killing and eating the customer. As a result, the Baron has a remarkably low bad
debt ratio.
Nonetheless, customers who have been eaten by monsters are not very good at
paying off their debts afterwards, so there remain a number of cleared open items
in the baron’s SAP system relating to su ch bad debts. Luckily for the baron, the
Transylvanian government has recognized this problem. If the baron sends an
electronic extract of such bad debts to the government each month, then he can
get tax relief for them.
Now imagine there is a program that look s at the cleared open items relating to
bad debts; it runs each month and sends that data to the government in the format
it requires. The most important thing naturally is not to claim the same bad
debt twice, because that would be fr aud—much worse than killing and eating
your customers.
The program identifies which customers are bad debt customers (i.e., did not pay
their bills and thus have been eaten), loops through each such customer, and
reads that customer’s cleared open items. Once this data has been retrieved from
the database, the program loops through each record and applies some business
logic to determine if the record should be sent to the government.
There is a variable called GD_WOFF_DATE that stores the date on which the customer
came to a gruesome end. Because this isthe government the baron’s dealing with,
the rules are quite complicated: any cl eared items with a creation date ( CPUDT)
equal to or later than the date of th e customer’s horrible, horrible death ( GD_
WOFF_DATE) can be claimed as a tax write-off. For open items with a creation date
earlier than the write-off date, on ly items with a clearing date ( AUGDT) greater or
equal to the write-off date can be claimed.
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