Credit Card Processing Scenario Related

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

I have a business scenario and needs to know, how this can be accomplished in SAP.

1. Customer buys goods from website, website is managed by e-commerce vendor. Upon checking out customer enters credit card details and clicks on check out.

2. E-commerce vendor sends the information to third party vendor clearing house to authorize the credit card. Upon authorizing the credit card details, the clearing house send back  OK code to e-commerce vendor.

3. E-commerce vendor sends information to sap for creation of sales order with details like material, qty, amount, tax,...etc along with approval code.

4. In SAP order is created and shipped.

5. E-commerce vendor receives shipping notification (ASN) from SAP and sends information to third party clearing house to capture funds.

6. Invoice is created and accounting documents are created.

7. Bank sends statement containing all the transactions with amount and bank charge fees

8. Information is entered back in legacy to clear receivables and put funds back to bank account.

I have gone thru the standard credit card processing and the related accounting documents, everything is works,. But the problem is authorization is taken place before creating the order and funds are captured after shipment and overall it differs from the process what we have.

Could you please guide me in right direction on how to go about it and also the correct ways of accounting entries and also reconciliation in when the bank statement is received.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

Jen

[Former Member]

Jen,

If I'm reading your process right, the e-commerce vendor is performing both initial authorization and the capture of funds with the clearing house, and then they are simply transferring via a bank the funds for the goods to you.  If this is correct, I'm curious why you are attempting to setup credit card processing in SAP at all.  Any additional information you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan

[Former Member]

Dan,

Thanks a lot for your reply. Your right, im not planning to have the credit card processing. May be im thinking to send back information from E-commerce vendor back to SAP to clear customer open items.

Thanks.

Jen

[Former Member]

Jen,

I think I understand now.  You are concerned that the standard credit card processing would automatically clear the open items as soon as the invoice and accounting document are created, yes?  But you would like to wait for the AR to be cleared until you receive payment from the e-commerce vendor? 

To my knowledge, the credit card process in SAP will clear the open receivable as soon as the accounting document is generated.  Would you be able to hold off on invoicing the customer until you receive payment from the e-commerce vendor?

Please let me know if my assumptions about your situation are wrong, and I'll happily look into it.

Thanks,

Dan

[former_member202002]

Jen,

Out of curiosity, is the credit card processing being performed by the E-commerce vendor in order to eliminate your company's/client's PCI compliance exposure?  Generally the only way to eliminate the PCI compliance requirements for a company is to completely outsource the capture, processing and storage of the payment details so that there is no visibility to that process within your organization.

You could consider simply creating a payment term of CCRD (or similar) and letting your documents post to that payment term in SAP.  Once you receive notification from your E-commerce vendor and/or bank that a deposit has been made you could import those details (in a BAI2 or similar file) to clear the corresponding Open Item with the CCRD payment terms.

Another option you can consider would leverage the standard SAP payment card processing functionality.  You could create the order in SAP and use "dummy" credit card details.  For example, if an order is processed by the E-commerce vendor with a credit card you could always populate SAP with VISA 4444333322221111 as a placeholder.  That would allow SAP to automate the GL postings and clear the customer Open Items while not exposing the "real" payment details in SAP.  The caution here would be that the postings made in SAP may, at times, not reflect what really happens in the third party E-commerce vendor system if a payment is rejected for Settlement/Capture.  In those cases you would need to reverse those postings in SAP.

Alternatively, you could consider implementing the standard SAP payment card processing functionality and bringing the payment details into SAP so that SAP controls the authorization and settlement.  Or perhaps only the settlement if the E-commerce vendor is processing the authorizations.  I'd recommend you tokenize the card number prior to bringing that information into your environment so that you could limit your PCI exposure.

I hope that helps and provides you with some options to consider.  Please let me know if I can assist further.

Regards,

Eric Bushman

www.paymetric.com