Question

From Which Designation Is It Preferred To Send The Output To The Printed?

Answer 1

A sales transaction involves various stages such as presales, order, delivery, pick/ pack, shipment, and billing. Each stage involves the generation of various documents specific to that stage. Sometimes these documents are required because of legal or commercial reasons, and sometimes they act as a milestone marking the completion of the stage. For example, an order acknowledgment that confirms the seller’s acceptance of the order marks the completion of the order stage; an invoice sent by the seller to the buyer is a confirmation of the completion of the sales transaction; and so on. Processing and generating these documents in a sales transaction often involves a lot of conditional permutations too. They can have different formats and may be communicated using various communication media such as printed copies or using electronic media such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) email, fax, and so on. A customer may be satisfied with receiving fax copies of order acknowledgments but may want invoices sent via email, for instance. In SAP SD, all these documents (order acknowledgment, delivery note, pick/pack list, shipping order, invoice, etc.) are called outputs , and their processing is controlled using the output determination technique provided by SAP. In SAP SD, you can define an output determination for the following stages of a sales cycle:

Sales activities

Sales documents such as quotation confirmations, order confirmations, and scheduling agreements

Shipping and transportation–related documents such as delivery notes, packing lists, and handling units

Billing-related documents such as invoices, credit notes, debit notes, and invoice lists

The process of setting up the output determination for the various stages mentioned here is fairly standard. Therefore, we will practice the customization using one sample only, namely, output determination for a sales document. Let’s start the journey with scope definition for the customization.