Condition contract management is a tool for bonus processing within a company. With the switch to S/4HANA, the well-known bonus processing is being abolished and replaced by condition contract management. Bonus processing should thus become more technically flexible and performant and offer more clarity for users. But does condition contract management keep what it promises? And what are the limits of the delivered SAP standard?
Developed for the S/4HANA system, it can also be activated in the ERP system via business functions and can therefore be used in the ERP system, even though the general switch to S/4HANA has not as yet taken place.
Condition contract management can be used for bonus processing in both sales and purchasing. However, it can also be used for other applications, such as commission settlement or special discounts. The following article will focus on bonus processing in sales.
What makes condition contract management better than the old bonus processing?
To answer this question, just take a look at the tables: While the old bonus processing described its own VBOX table and could take longer to write and read, condition contract management works directly with the VBRK and VBRP, so it always accesses the latest data. In practice, this means that provisions are not created by jobs or manual entries but are generated from each invoice.
This enables a precise overview of the sales basis and the resulting provisions for bonus processing in real time. If subsequent corrections lead to changes in the sales basis, a correction in the provisions can be automatically initiated using delta provision runs.
From the user’s perspective
For users, condition contract management offers a good overview of maintained conditions and created documents. Since the well-known condition technology has been used, most users should be familiar with the maintenance screen, which makes it easier to get used to the new transaction. Standard functions such as validity periods or scales are possible.
Upon calling up the condition contract using the WCOCO transaction, you can see the header data of the contract in the upper part of the screen, which contains all relevant information on organizational units, validity, sales basis and billing calendar on several tabs. The middle part of the screen is only used if you use a contract for several customers/suppliers at the same time. Here you get an overview of the customers/suppliers who are entitled to the benefit. The lower part of the screen shows the provision and bonus conditions that are later used in the invoices and billing documents.
There is therefore always a good overview of the conditions applied, the sales basis or the validity of the contract.
The sales basis, which can be found on a tab in the header data, is the heart of the condition contract, as this is where it is defined which sales are relevant to bonuses. For example, a combination of the sales organization, a customer hierarchy, document types and product groups can be defined. Values can also be included or excluded. The field selection can be easily adjusted and expanded in customizing. However, it must be noted that in the standard version only fields from the VBRK or VBRP tables can be included as fields in the catalogue.
Based on the defined sales basis, the system then determines the cumulative sales at the time of billing and the corresponding bonus paid out. The amount of the sales basis can be viewed and monitored at any time using reports.
The billing calendar can be used to set the frequency individually at which billing documents are created for each condition contract. The calendar can be generated and created manually to create billing annually, quarterly, monthly or even more often or to plan delta runs for provision corrections.
Condition contract management therefore offers users a clear tool for organizing bonus processing for customers and suppliers. In addition, depending on the selection criteria in the sales basis, i.e. depending on the level of detail in which documents are searched for in the VBRK and VBRP tables, it is efficient and always delivers data in real time.
From the consultant’s perspective
A wide range of customization options is available for consultants, which allows very detailed control. There is also a long list of business add-ins with which almost endless further modification-free adjustments can be made.
However, the standard program also has its limits in customization, which may mean development work.
If you want to set up condition contracts for one or more customer hierarchies, OSS note 2553392 is a good way to set up the customization correctly. However, there may then be problems finding the correct bonus recipient, as the system does not take into account that there can be different customers for calculating the sales basis and bonus recipients within a hierarchy.
Another problem in practice could be that there can only be one condition contract per billing calendar. If, for example, a customer receives a bonus paid out monthly and another bonus every six months, then two different condition contracts must be set up for this. Technically, this is not a problem, because condition contracts can be used in the invoices and provisions can be created there. However, it is important that users keep an overview of the various contracts for each customer.
This leads to the third challenge in condition contract management: There is only a relatively small number of reports. While a good overview of the details is maintained within a contract, users may find it difficult to obtain all the important information about the various contracts at a glance. The existing reports offer a large selection of available fields and can be customized using their own layouts. However, there is still room for improvement in terms of practicality and appearance.
Conclusion
Condition contract management is a high-performance, user-friendly and new function for bonus processing. It offers many options for individualizing the functions in customizing and thus making them usable for companies. It reaches its limits when the bonus agreements become very complex, but allows a large number of modification-free adjustments to find solutions.
If a company wants to introduce bonus processing in SAP and has not yet switched to S/4HANA, condition contract management can still be activated in the ERP system and later simply transferred to S/4HANA. This could make the decision for condition contract management even easier.
