The Payment Medium Workbench (PMW) is a tool used to configure and create payment media sent by organizations to their house banks.  These payment files, popularly called DME files, are replacing traditional SAP programs for generating electronic payment instructions.

SAP has pre-delivered several country-specific formats which can be further customized according to the requirements of a particular payment institution. Whereas building a DME tree (Transaction code DMEEX) is itself an art, this blog doen not seek to explain how to create a DME tree in SAP. There are several blogs already available on that topic, and I have given links at the end to some useful blogs on how to build a DME Payment file.

In this blog, we look at the various ways to send “Note to payee” in the payment format

According to the SAP help pages –

A note to payee is a field on a data medium containing information on paid line items relevant for the business partner.

Number and length of the note to payee fields are defined in the payment medium format, whilst the content itself is defined in the note to payee.

The note to payee section can be used to send additional information about the payments made. It is possible to send a lot of additional information Invoice Number (of invoice paid), Date of Invoices paid, Amount (before deductions), Deductions and net amount.

However commercial formats like WIRES for example have a limitation on the number of characters that can be sent via the payment file. This can be from 50 to 200 characters. In such cases it is not possible to send very detailed information through the file.

On the other hand, there may be cases where the bank or financial institution offers services to print and post(mail) the cheques and payment advices to vendors. In the latter case, very detailed information needs to be sent to the bank so that they can print the cheques and payment advise with all the information.

General settings for note to payee:

Creating a Note to payee

SAP Transaction “OBPM2” is used to create a note to payee. We create a custom “Note to payee” by copying a standard one For example, the standard note to payee SAP_CGI is copied into ZSAP_CGI

The Note to payee sends the following information , mainly the Reference Number of the Invoice paid, and date, plus some other fields like Payment document number and date.

The Note to payee is then attached to the DME format in SAP Transaction FBZP in the payment method

In the next step we need to specify the length of the Note to payee. For this we go to the payment format in Transaction OBPM1

Structured and Instructed tags for Note to Payee

As mentioned above there are two ways to send remittance information, through structured manner via the tag “STRD” or the Unstructured information via the tag “USTRD”

Unstructured information

Generally, bank formats allow for very limited number of characters to be sent via the note to payee.

In such case, we can only send Unstructured Information using the USTRD tags and the Note to payee configuration given above

Because of the limitation of the length of the field, it is difficult to send multiple invoices Information via this field

 Structured information

The structured tag allows more information to be send in the payment file. This is required when the bank itself prints Cheques/ Payment advices based on the payment file

Here the structured information is sent as below

If we expand the “RfrdDocAmt” tag it has the breakup of the amount paid as follows

The paid amount is broken down into Due payable amount, Discount Amount, Dredit note Amount, tax base, tax amount and “Final Remitted Amount”

In practice the amount would look something like this –

Effectively multiple STRD tags can be sent for a single payment , indicating details of multiple invoices paid via the payment

Checking the Checkbox in payment variant

The “Structured Remittance Information” checkbox needs to be checked in the variant (Transaction OBPM4) if the payment file needs to send structured remittance information

To conclude, we need to choose the correct Note to payee depending on the file format used by the bank and the level of detail we need to send. The STRD and USTRD tags in the file can be chosen based on the requirement

References:

SAP Help Portal : https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_ON-PREMISE/3eb1567cf97543c08087efb0936964e6/7e3ac6535e601e4be10000000a174cb4.html?version=2022.000&locale=en-US

Note to Payee | SAP Help Portal

Useful Blogs : DMEE Configuration:Step By Step Part 1 | SAP Blogs

Functionalities in DMEE Configuration | SAP Blogs

Co-authored by: Saadia El Baslaoui