NAM Cash Allocation - Manual Payments

Table of contents 

Objective and Scope 

The purpose of this document is to describe the flow to handle payments received from third party customers and how to search all the necessary information for cash allocation process. 

The payments are received on SOLVAY FINANCE AMERICA's bank accounts and OTC AR matches those payments that could not be matched automatically by the system. This procedure describes which steps should be followed in order to track all the necessary information for the cash allocation process. 

This operating procedure (OP) applies to the account receivables of SOLVAY FINANCE AMERICA.

Definitions

1. • SBS: In the current document, “Solvay Business Services” will be replaced by its abbreviation “SBS”.
   • OTC AR: Order to cash Accounts Receivable
   • OTC CM: Order to cash Credit Management
   • CSR: Customer Service Representative
   • OP: Operating procedure
   • 4044: Company Code of PI system for handling Cash Allocation
   • SFA: Solvay Finance America
   • DZ: Customer  payment

Cash Allocation

Bank Statements Extraction

On a daily basis, the Bank electronic files with information about the amounts received on SOLVAY FINANCE AMERICA bank accounts are uploaded into SAP. The system does the first sorting and processes the payments in which there is some valid and correct information displayed on the bank statement. Therefore, all the payments that could not be processed by the system have to be allocated manually by OTC AR.

The first thing to do is to extract the bank statements at the site of the JP Morgan Bank and Citibank (payments received in MXN).

Lockbox Transaction

After downloaded  all bank statement files, payments have to be posted on customer accounts using FLB1 transaction.
If we receive a payment for an invoice that is already cleared against a credit note, we should re-open the credit note and clear the invoice with the payment. The credit note can be deducted by the customer on the next payment.

 FLB1 transaction.

Search by invoice number 

Open “Z3F_FA_CNTR_DISPLAY” transaction. The first screen that appears is the following: “Factoring contract display”.

This screen should be filled in as follows:

Affiliate document number – Invoice number

Then click on the Execute button  

All details regarding the invoice number are displayed on the following screen: 

The image is divided by colours to easily explain the fields. Therefore: 

Red: In this box, we can find the customer name, the document (invoice or credit note) and its amount

Green: Here we can find the contract status (open, closed, etc.) and creation dates

Yellow : In these fields, we can see information regarding the affiliate as the company code, document (Invoice reference), reference and PO Ref. Also the customer number in local company is visible here

Blue: Information of the document in 0231. Again the inv. Reference available and customer number is in 0231.

Pink: On the left side, all the information regarding dates for affiliate and factoring side. On the right side, it is displayed all the information related to payment status (open or closed in Cc 0231, payment method and discount terms

Search by customer name 

Click on the floppy disk on the payment. The following screen appears: 

To search for the customer number, click on the icon . Following screen appears:

This screen enables us to search for a customer by country, by name, etc.

Advise:  Use upper case letters and if you are not sure of the entire name, type a part of the name, surrounded by asterisks, as in the upper example and then click on  .

When the system finds a result, following screen appears:

Double-click on the customer name to automatically return to the previous screen – “Post with Clearing Select open items”.  The “Account” field is automatically filled in with the customer number as follows:

Click on “Process open items”. 

 Open items= list of invoices not yet paid in the customer account

Search using “Specificities of NAM Customers” Database

All specificities regarding to customers of NAM Region can be found in the Google drive or in the following link:

Posting a payment as DZ on customer account

Sometimes there are payments received from identified customers but without any payment details (invoice numbers). Those amounts cannot be matched on customer’s accounts against the invoices but they must be applied on the customer’s account as a DZ document. Then, a dispute should be created to obtain the payment details. 

In order to leave the payment open on customer’s account, we should proceed as follows: 

We should click on Save button on the payment screen on FLB1transaction:

Click on the green arrow at the top of the screen 

Following screen appears:

This screen must be filled in as follows: 

• PstKy: 15 (for credit movement on customer account – Incoming payment)
• Account: Customer Number

Afterwards, click on  ‘Enter’.  The following screen appears:

In order to insert the amount, simply type asterisk  “* “in the Amount field and press Enter  to avoid errors (more accurate). The item can be now validated by clicking on the floppy disk 

Payment in Advance procedure

Sometimes we receive payments made by customers before the goods are shipped and invoice sent and assigned to SOLVAY FINANCE AMERICA. Therefore, we receive the payment and the invoice isn’t yet available on customer account. 

There are three steps that should be considered when recording a payment in advance: 

1. The customer must be identified
2. Check whether there is an invoice open in that account, and if not, consult the various systems to determine if an advanced payment is expected
3. If the order, customer and amount are identical of what is stated on bank statement, we are authorized to process the E5 (payment in advance). If not a dispute should be created requesting confirmation to Collections Team.

Process a Payment in advance

The first thing to do is to post the payment on customer account as a “DZ” document type entry (see paragraph 4.3 of this procedure). 

Then, we should transform the  “DZ”  entry into an  “E5”  entry through  Z3F_FA_PIA transaction.

This screen has to be filled in as follows:  

• Company code: 4044
• Customer: Customer number in which payment was allocated
• Processing Mode: N
• Test mode: Not selected

We should select the line of the payment that needs to be transformed into payment in advance, double click on it and fill it as follows:

• Aff.Co Co: Affiliate number
• Sales Doc.: Sales order (we should fill this field or the Billing doc. – Only one is needed)
• Billing Doc.: Billing doc. (we should fill this field or the Sales doc. – Only one is needed)

Then we should choose button  and the Amount field will be filled automatically with the Sales document amount. Please note that BusA field must be filled in, otherwise payment in advance will not be processed. When there are differences between this amount and the payment, it can be for several reasons: partial payment, banking fees, etc. Thus an analysis should be performed to trace the reason of the difference.

Click on 

Choose Yes in the table and the following message appears:

After this posting, a job will run automatically and will create an E5 document on customer account. See below an example:

A dispute will be automatically created informing Credit Manager of the posting. 

When the invoice is assigned and there is no difference or the difference is on the customer master data tolerance, an automatic job runs every day and clears the E5 with the invoice (s). If there is a difference which is above the tolerance, the job will not clear and collections should ask information to the responsible CSR and Credit Manager.

As soon as the invoice is cleared, the posting on customer account is as below: