Debit and Credit Notes

Mistakes do happen in the processing of a sales transaction. This creates a need for an adjustment or correction process. Debit notes and credit notes are these adjustment documents in SAP. You create a debit note in SAP to debit the customer for any underbilled amount and a credit note to credit the customer for any overbilled amount, without involving any goods movement. Under billing and overbilling are not the only criteria for creating debit and credit notes. There may be various other reasons too. For example, you may have an agreement with your customer to get reimbursed for any expense you incurred on behalf of your customer with relation to the sales transaction, such as freight charges, insurance, and so on. In such cases, a debit note is also used for charging these actual expenses to the customer.

You can create a debit or credit note with a reference to a sales document, a contract, or a billing document, and you can even create one without a reference to any document. The structure of a debit and credit note document consists of a header and item. Since no delivery is involved, the schedule line category is not required. Because there is no delivery step involved in a debit or credit document and they straightaway hit accounting, organizations generally keep these documents under a default billing block. An authorized person then reviews these documents and releases the billing block. If you are not satisfied with this two-level validation process and need something like a release strategy, you can define one by using status profiles. For example, you can set up the user-defined statuses as initial, blocked, rejected, and released, and you can then provide the authorizations for these different individuals. Once the documents are approved or released from the billing block, they can be processed using billing process and posted to accounting. In standard SAP, the document type CR with the document category K and billing type G2 exists for a credit note, and document type DR with document category L and billing type L2 exists for a debit note. The screen sequence group is GA, which controls the display of the screens in VA01, VA02, and VA03 transactions, which you use for the maintenance of credit/debit note request documents.

Item categories available in standard SAP are G2N, GFN and L2N, and LFN, where G2N and L2N are for normal sales order–related credit/debit documents, and GFN and LFN are for billing plan–related credit/debit sales documents. All these item categories are set up for order-relevant billing.