Electronic Bank Statement in SAP
Medium to large scale businesses do thousands of transactions each day. Lot of these transactions are banking related. Reconciling bank balances with book balances manually is not possible.
Uploading manual bank statement in ERP system is a time consuming affair and prone to clerical errors due to manual intervention. Treasury staff in an organisation may end up spending lot of time usually at the end of month for reconciliation.
Electronic bank statement feature provided by SAP can save a lot of time and is error free. SAP will upload the file which is sent (FTP) by bank. Based upon SAP configurations financial postings will be done. This configuration will upload the statement automatically and at the same time will do the bank sub ledger postings and clearing postings.
Prerequisites
Following are the basic requirements for setting up EBS in SAP:
- House Bank
- Bank file in specified format
- SAP Configurations for EBS
- Set up connection between SAP and bank for file transfer mostly secured (sFTP)
- SAP automated batch set up
SAP Configuration of electronic bank statement(EBS)
Financial Accounting –> Bank Accounting –> Business Transaction –> Payment Transactions –> Electronic bank statement
EBS is done at Chart of Account Level
1. Account symbol creation – Account symbols are specifications for general ledger accounts. These are posted with each possible transaction contained in bank statement.
2. Assign accounts to account symbol – GL accounts are mapped to account symbols in this step.
3. Create keys for posting rule – Description for the necessary posting rules is entered in this step. Each posting rule represents a business transaction.
4. Define posting rules – In this activity posting specifications for each posting rule is created. You specify how a certain business transaction is to be posted with which posting key, document type and posting type.
5. Create transaction type – Transaction type contains the external transaction type. External transaction types are codes used by banks to specify the business transaction in bank file. Transaction types in turn are link between External Transaction Types, Posting Rules and Interpretation Algorithms. Interpretation algorithm interprets the note to payee line in bank statement and accordingly clears the open items accordingly.
6. Assign bank account to transaction types – Last step involved is assigning bank accounts with transaction types as defined above. This step contains the list of external transaction which are valid for a house bank. Please note that assignment is of Bank account number and Bank Routing Number and not of GL account in this step.