How to bill freight costs to the customer?

[former_member194343]

Dear all,

we as a shipper (Chemistry business) want to introduce SAP TM.

We are currently using LE-TRA for the processing of our shipments. There is a standard functionality which allows shipment costs (as calculated in the Shipment cost document) to be billed directly to the bill-to-parties of the included deliveries/sales orders. With SAP TM, we want to perform charge calculation in TM, of course. To our current knowledge, there is no standard functionality which allows shipment costs transferred from SAP TM to SAP ERP to be billed to the customer. Is there any "common" custom development or does anyone have an idea where to start for this?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

For a similar requirement, we 'custom integrated' our sales orders/deliveries to create FWO's (instead of OTR/DTR's) which then automatically creates FU's (based on FWO's FUBR).

Onwards, FU's can be planned to create FO's and FSD's; while FWO's can create Forwarding settlement documents which can be transferred back to ERP for customer invoicing.

There is standard interface available for this order integration (since its a sales order to TRQ integration- FWO is just another type of TRQ), and your ABAPer will need to set the field mapping right. This takes some efforts but the design surely works smooth.

Regards,

narender

[former_member194343 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for this answer! But, going this way, this results in two invoices to the customer, one for the material and one for the freight, right? I don't think we could explain that...

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

You are right. Ideally speaking you would need to invoice the customer only when you are in a forwarding business. We mapped similar case for an 'embedded LSP' kind of business (where one of the business units of a company caters to the transportation of other BU's). So we created only an internal settlement document from the FWO (it could be either intra or inter-company internal settlement).

Can you elaborate why you being a shipper would need to invoice a 'customer'?  As much as I remember LE-TRA, the shipment costs transferred to a customer invoice also pertain to only freight( by virtue of check mark TSPP in pricing procedures and few copy controls etc.).

[former_member194343 · Accepted solution]

Of course I can 🙂 Say we are selling a product XYZ to company ABC. In SAP ERP, we enter a sales order for the product and subsequently create a delivery and a shipment. The shipment is in most cases created by our internal Logistics department. They take care of communication with carriers etc. Because we have maintained our freight rates in the system, shipments costs are automatically calculated for the shipment in the corresponding shipment cost document.

As soon as the shipment costs are calculated. the sales order can be invoiced. The invoice contains conditions regarding to the material (e.g. list price, discounts...) as well as to the shipment. These conditions are (in fact: have to be) the same as in the shipment cost document. If defined in the calculation scheme, we can even give discounts/surcharges on the freight.

As a result, the customer ABC receives a single invoice for the order, containing material and freight costs.

We could go on with this if we wanted to have fixed freight rates for customer billing which are independent of the actual freight costs (which will be calculated in SAP TM in the future). But we are not Amazon 😉 So we want to bill the actual freight costs to our customers. This seems to be common in Chemical Industry - correct me if I'm wrong!

[tarunkumar · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

I agree with you completely. We have designed exactly the same scenario as you mentioned recently for a manufacturer (Shipper) who wants to include actual freight charges in billing document.

Achieving it depends upon your previous process (e.g. your process starts from OTR integration or from DTR integration).

Best option is to utilize the cost distribution feature of TM which will push the freight cost (material specific) to the ABD (Agency Business Documents) in ERP. From ABD you can pull the relevant freight cost to your billing document by doing some customizations and implementing BADIs.

Exact modeling depends a lot on your detailed scenario.

Thanks & Regards,

Tarun

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Agreed with Tarun. ABD is easier way to go about it in this scenario. It should be lesser customizations to pull ABD charges to customer invoice. There are BADi's available around ABD settings.

[former_member182454 · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

Ultimately did you proceed ahead with ABD documents to meet your solution?