The activity based pricing functionality provides the possibility to charge a customer an extra amount for a sales order related activity. The charge can be seen as a type of surcharge for performing any such activities that warrant this kind of extra charge.
Examples:
- In, for example, the pharmaceutical industry, it is common practice to receive sales orders via data interchange. If, for example, one of your customers wants you to place their order for them, this could warrant an extra charge for the time/administration needed to perform such an activity.
- You may deem it necessary to charge a customer for picking goods after work hours for manually entered orders.
- You may deem it necessary to charge a customer for the cost incurred to take a different route for manually entered orders.
The activities that are chargeable can occur during sales order entry, picking, delivery or transport and can be based on an order, order line, unit, volume or weight if certain criteria are met. Valid criteria include the order type, order source, ABP item group, route or route group. These parameters are set up in the ABP condition file.
ABP charge determination
When a sales order, which fulfills the activity-, base- and criterion, makes its way through the sales order cycle an ABP charge calculation program is called to check if a charge is defined for the current activity and order. The charge calculation program searches for an amount to be charged on the basis of the activated activity-, base- and criterion code combinations in the ABP chargeable activity table. For each of the combinations, the Work with ABP conditions file is checked if an amount is defined for the current criterion contents of the processed order (e.g. order type or route). Determined charges are added to an ABP charge file to be the basis for the ABP invoice generation. You can view the records in the charge file via the ABP charges enquiry.
ABP order generation and invoicing
On a regular basis you can generate the ABP sales orders. This is done via the ABP invoice selection routine which uses the DI interface. This routine selects all charges from the ABP charge file according to the selection and will create normal sales orders of type ABP in the regular sales order entry routine. The fictitious item for which the charge will apply will be assigned as well as the default order type for activity based pricing orders. In addition, if the sales order type that is to be used for ABP invoice (sales order) creation was set up with no documents except for invoice, the order status will automatically be set to 45. During the ABP invoice selection routine, a list will also be printed. You can choose if you want to have the charges summarized on the printout per fictitious item. If you set the Create details field to NO, the amount to charge will be summarized per customer and fictitious item. If you set the Create details field to YES, every line on the order will be printed.
The actual invoice to send to the customer is retrieved via the normal invoicing routine.