SAP Basics: Looking At An Invoice and Generating a Purchase Order
The "SAP Basics" series focuses on the basics of using SAP in sales, order entry and customer service. This article covers how to view a billing document and how to generate a purchase order.
Sometimes, you will need to look at a billing document (or invoice) in SAP. In many situations, you will not have the capability of looking at a copy of the actual invoice that will go to the customer, or you will not have the system permissions to do so. However, you can still look at the items and charges on a particular invoice by going to the VF03 screen (Display Billing Document). To get there, type VF03 in the box at the top left of the main user menu, or /NVF03 in the same box if you are currently in any other screen. Press Enter.
The Display Billing Document will then come up. Type the invoice or billing document number you want to look at in the text box next to "Billing document" and press enter. This will pull up the information from that particular invoice, credit or debit memo. There you can see the customer payer account number, their name and billing address, the items invoiced (along with their SAP
material numbers) and the amount being invoiced for each, as well as the total ("Net Value"). You can't make any changes in this screen. For that, you'd have to go to screen VF02, and unless you work in an accounting role, you will probably not have access to that screen.
To generate a purchase order (PO) in SAP, go to the ME21N screen. Fill in the designated system number for the vendor you're buying from (#1 in the picture below), assuming that they are already set up in the system. The fill in the SAP item number(s) to be ordered, the requested or expected shipping date and the quantity (#2 in the picture below). Once you press Enter, most other fields in that column should populate. You can go to the 'Texts' tab to add notes or instructions to the vendor. Click on "Messages" (next to where it says "Print Preview" to print a hard copy. Save the order by clicking on the floppy disk icon (#3). A purchase order number will appear in a message at the bottom of the screen.
