Accounts Payable-Procure to Pay (P2P)

Accounts Payable / Procure to Pay (P2P) Process Overview

The Accounts Payable / Procure to Pay (P2P) overall process covers the complete cycle from Vendor Master
Maintenance through procurement and Vendor Invoice Processing, the resulting Payment Processing to external
vendors and the Period Closing Activities. All processes are accompanied by comprehensive and mature
monitoring to accomplish Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Compliance.

The Procure to Pay sub-processes covering Fixed Asset setup; capitalization and administration are not included
in this process view.

Assumption for an effective P2P process:

The P2P process assumes that the following SAP modules are in place:
FI, AM, MM, PM (optionally for equipment master records). The described Invoice Processing is designed as an
SAP Business Workflow/SAP Web flow process including Optical Archiving for all incoming documents.
Therefore a scanning and optical archiving infrastructure needs to be in place to support the workflow
functionality. The optical archive storage system needs to fulfil legal and tax requirements to enable the storage
of 'original documents'.

Accounts payable /P2P Process interfaces at SAP's SSC

It is interesting to see how different companies approach their AP process. The most common is a partially
decentralized processing of AP, as it has developed over time. This works as follows: companies keep invoices at
the local subsidiaries and only the financial data get passed over to the SSC for processing. In order to minimize
the administrative effort of transferring paper invoices into electronic formats, more advanced companies have
centralized the AP processing completely. In this case invoices are sent to the SSC.
Below there is an example of the typical process cut for the AP/P2P process, with the SSC Interfaces for the SAP
SSC:

As a prerequisite, a purchase order needs to be issued before actual purchases are made. This system entry
allows an easier tracking of incoming invoices and allows an efficient approval process. When goods arrive, a
receiving clerk begins the process of quality and quantity check to assure that the goods delivered match the
items and quantities on the invoice. The invoice is scanned to be available electronically in the system.