Third Party Billing Rel. based on PO IR

[former_member657719]

HI All,

For Third Party Order Processing (we call this TPOP), my company would like to release SO billing and collect costs of goods sold via PO Invoice Receipt (IR).   As soon as PO was invoiced the SO would be eligible for billing.   Once billed the PO IR cost would then flow to the SO billing doc condition VPRS.  

For this to occur we want to change billing relevancy for these orders (item cat. ZTAS and TAS) to "F" (Invoice Receipt Qty), thus this would allow corresponding SO to be released for billing once PO IR has been posted.   PO IR posts and when SO bills the VPRS condition in billing doc contains the correct PO invoice cost, etc).    For us, once billing doc is triggered all the price conditions in that billing doc are pulled into BW for cost analysis...they will use VPRS for TPOP Costs.     No issues here at this point...just have to implement.  

However, here is my question on this process:  If I base the billing relevancy on "F" (releases SO to be billed and collects the PO IR costs) what if the PO is a "Free of Charge (FOC)" item back from the Third party supplier?    In this case there would only be a PO GR and no PO IR posted.  By PO being marked "FOC" the invoice receipt indicator on the PO line item is unchecked and no Invoice can be posted against this order.   So in this case, how does the SO get triggered for billing as it is waiting on PO IR to be released, etc? Ideas?

Thanks.

[VeselinaPeykova · Accepted solution]

It has been quite some time since I dabbled in TPOP for the last time, but I still remember that I spent quite some time digging for SAP notes and testing various scenarios.

I wonder whether you have tried the idea of free item (from the purchase order) in the third-party scenario in your development/sandbox system.

If yes - how did it go, did it work? If not (a very likely outcome) - did you check the SAP notes related to third-party order processing?

If you have searched and read the SAP notes, but for somehow you have not come across 498162 - FAQ: Third-party order processing in purchasing, I suggest to take a look at it - the explanation in the answer to question 2 seems to be what you are looking for.

The workaround suggested there looks a bit drastic and I would strongly recommend to discuss the impact with your MM consultant and the solution architect. If you actually decide to go with the proposed solution - please test extensively all possible scenarios to determine whether it is safe/worth it to implement that in your productive environment.