SAP Business: Electronic and Manual Bank Statements

January 1, 2010 by mySAP
Filed under: Treasury Process

This SAP Business refers to the process of posting electronic/manual bank statements.

Common Business Requirement

Bank statements reflect movements in bank balances resulting from various activities such as loan/deposit interest, overdraft, incoming payment from customers and outgoing payment to vendors.

Periodically, bank statements are either downloaded from bank websites or are sent to your company by the banks. Where bank statements are in MT940 format (format compatible for uploading in SAP), the bank statements will be uploaded.

If banks are able to provide information on the line items in the bank statements, upon posting of the bank statements, bank clearing accounts (e.g. incoming and outgoing clearing accounts) will be cleared.

Where banks are not able to provide information on the line items, the bank statement will be posted and clearing will be done subsequently (either manually or automatically). Sometimes, due to technical reasons, some line items in the bank statement may not get posted.

In this case, post processing is required where user will determine how these line items will be posted. Where bank statements are not uploaded, they will be manually entered into the system. After electronic/ manual bank statements have been posted, bank reconciliation should be carried out. In bank reconciliation, investigation is carried to check why there are unmatched items in the clearing accounts.

Detail and Design

Bank Accounts and GL Accounts

In general, the company has separate bank accounts for incoming and outgoing payment. For each bank account, there will be a main bank GL account and one or more clearing accounts. The main bank GL account will be created as allowing automatic posting only.

During incoming or outgoing payment transactions, the bank clearing accounts will be debited/ credited. When bank statements are posted, the bank clearing accounts will be debited/ credited and the main bank GL account will be debited/credited. In this way, the main bank GL account balance will always be equal to the actual bank account balance.

Electronic Bank Statement

The following settings need to be made for electronic bank statement:

Bank accounts are assigned to transaction types. Transaction types represent the type of bank statements which company receives. For example, a country has one bank account for payment with Citibank and one bank account for payment with Deutsche Bank. These two bank accounts will be assigned to two different transaction types, as the information provided on the bank statements of both banks will be different.
External transactions are assigned to transaction types. External transactions are abbreviations on bank statements which indicate the type of transaction (e.g. bank transfer, cheque deposit) from the bank’s perspective.
Posting rules are assigned to external transactions. Posting rules determine the posting keys and document types used in posting the bank statement. For example, if the external transaction is incoming payment, the posting rule will specify that the incoming payment bank GL account should be posted with posting key 40 and the incoming bank clearing account should be posted with posting key 50. Posting rules also determine if the bank clearing accounts are cleared at the time of bank statement posting. In addition, posting rules determine which GL accounts get posted via account symbols.
Account symbols are assigned to GL accounts. For the same account symbol, different GL accounts can be assigned for posting using different currencies.

Addition configuration will be required for each new country due to different bank accounts and bank statement contents.

Manual Bank Statement

When posting manual bank statements, user needs to enter manual bank statement transaction. Manual bank statement transactions are assigned to transaction types and the remaining settings is similar to electronic bank statement. Addition configuration will be required for each new country due to different bank accounts and bank statement contents.