SAP Liquid Planner

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SAP Liquidity Planner

Purpose
In an age of global competition and value-oriented management strategies, financial planning plays an increasingly important role in the management of a company. The key aim is to recognize liquidity deficits or surpluses in time and to identify expected foreign currency positions in the planning period. Recording planning data on a timely basis and adapting it as soon as circumstances change, as well as decentralized processes for capturing data all contribute to the challenges facing financial planning activities that aim to indicate future trends. The Liquidity Planner provides tools for entering and adjusting, aggregating and evaluating planned cash flows, and for determining actual values. Easy-to-use tools provide the decisionmakers with all the information they need, as and when it is available. With this information, they have a clearer picture of the financial situation and can optimize the use of their financial resources. You can therefore use the Liquidity Planner to extend your planning horizon and have a greater active influence on the expected cash flows. This ranges from the classical use of financial budgeting values through to their inclusion in more detailed risk analyses.

Integration
SAP Liquidity Planner is a subcomponent of SAP Financial Supply Chain Management.

Features
In the Assignment topic you will find information about programs that you can use to assign functionally accurate liquidity items to actual payments. In some cases you will find it useful to transfer certain amounts, without reference to a particular document, from one liquidity item to another. You can create, change or display these transfers from the application menu. Queries are defined in Settings. These are the rules with which mechanisms derive liquidity items. These queries contain conditions for the values available for each mechanism and the liquidity item used if the condition defined in the query is met. Under Information Systemyou will find information about the most important reports for the liquidity calculation.

Use
The main objective of the as-is analysis (liquidity calculation) is to provide a functional classification of payments made according to their origin and use, for example incoming payments from the sale of products or outgoing payments for personnel costs. The system displays the origin and use by means of liquidity items. The classification is carried out by directly assigning separate payments to liquidity items. The assignment can use a range of information already available in the system. There are a number of assignment programs that can assign a new liquidity item to payments on the basis of diverse information. These assignment programs, which are independent of each other, (program names RFLQ_ASSIGN*, each with report documentation) offer a range of selection options which means that the line item subset to be processed can be limited fairly precisely.

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At the moment, six programs are delivered for automatic assignment. The three most important can be found in the SAP Easy Accessmenu: Assignment from bank statement information Assignment from FI information: evaluation of information from customer and vendor line items in payment documents Assignment from invoices: Assignment takes place in two steps: Information is first of all taken from customer and debitor line items in payment documents in the same way as above. The program subsequently evaluates expense and revenue items in invoices for selected liquidity items. The liquidity item that results from the first step is replaced by the item resulting from the second step if it is successful.

Assignment mechanisms require a set of rules and are intended for automatically transferring large numbers of payment items. For more information about creating sets of rules, see Settings. If you want to individually assign liquidity items to a single payment, you can use: Manual assignment: Enter the liquidity items you want to assign to a payment item directly. This is a postprocessing transaction for payments that are not processed by means of the automatic assignment but which do not warrant extending the set of rules. You can go to this transaction from the line items list.

Integration
The liquidity calculation updates online the payment documents created in the system in its own line items and totals tables. A data pool is generated in which the assignment programs can operate in any order. You will need to activate this online update in Customizing for each company code. You must also define the liquidity items which were assigned to the line items when they were created and depending on their +/- sign. These items are dummy items of the following types: Incoming payments in general Outgoing payments in general The assignment programs replace these items later with the correct functional items. The line items are generated online at the same time as the accounting document is created. You do not need to use the electronic or manual bank statement. Use the RFLQ_REBUILD program to create line items for existing accounting documents.

Prerequisites
You will need to create a set of rules for each assignment program for the automatic assignment mechanisms used. For more information, see Settings.

Features
Each assignment program imports line items on the basis of the selection criteria and processes the documents one by one. If new liquidity items can be assigned based the rules, the line item is changed. If not, it remains unchanged. Each assignment program has a test run option. If you activate this option, no changes are made in the database. This function is used primarily for check and analysis purposes. In addition, you can display the processed documents in a detail list. This function offers you a range of filters and links.

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Activities
To call the relevant assignment program, select from the SAP Easy Access menu: Accounting Financial Supply Chain Management Cash and Liquidity Management Liquidity Planner Assignment: From Bank Statement Information From FI Information From Invoices Manually

Example
You have analyzed the relevant liquidity items structure and have reached the conclusion that you can get some of the required information from the bank statement. The rest you will have to get from accounting documents. In some cases you will have to go back to the expense or investment lines of paid invoices. In this case you decide to use the programs for assignment from bank statement information and invoices. You set up the program for assignment from bank statement information (which evaluates bank statement information) so that only the definite liquidity items are assigned. Most of the line items remain in their original dummy items. You will want to ensure that the program for assignment from invoices (which is run regularly after the program for assignment from bank statement information) does not reassign payments that were correctly assigned by the previous program. Restrict the old liquidity item or the origin indicator as required in the selection screen.

In order to process the set of rules for the first step of the program for assignment from invoices you should use the program for assignment from FI information; it is no longer required in productive operation.