Accounts receivables
SAP AR (accounts receivables) is SAP ERP module offering the functionalities related to customer accounting. It supports the management of customer master data defining all the key characteristics of customers and maintains balances (either debit or credit) per customer account. These balances are affected by the posting of financial documents comprised of line items referring to the customer accounts. These documents are themselves the consequence of business processes affecting the customer positions. These processes include the customer invoicing, the customer payments, the overdue interest calculation, the down-payments booking, … Additionally, Accounts Receivable provides support functionalities which do not necessarily affect directly customer positions but improve straight-through-processing, collection processes (dunning), correspondance, …
SAP Accounts Receivable is a sub-ledger of SAP Financial Accounting and, as such, is integrated in realtime with SAP General Ledger through the use of reconciliation accounts. This mechanism allows for many customer accounts to be mapped to a small set of General Ledger accounts providing aggregated customer balances to the General Ledger accounting. This way, general accounting always has an accurate view on customer balances while the details of these balances (the line items) are only known to the customer accounting.