1720356 - How To Determine The External Reference In A Customer Invoice

When saving or releasing a Customer Invoice, you find the manually maintained External Reference value XYZ (XYZ represents the number you maintained as External Reference ID) is replaced by the Customer Invoice ID ABC (ABC represents the ID of your Customer Invoice) generated by the system.

SAP Business ByDesign

1. Go to the Customer Invoicing work center.
2. Create New Manual Invoice.
3. Maintain the necessary invoice data and enter the External Reference XYZ.
4. Click Save as Invoice button OR the Release button.

The External Reference value is replaced by the Customer Invoice ID ABC.

In the current release, the external reference field is visible in the Customer Invoice UI. There are 3 methods to determine the External Reference in Business Configuration.

• Copied from Own ID:
  The External Reference field in the invoice document contains the ID of the document that is transferred to accounting. For example, if you create and save a Customer Invoice with ID ABC, then the ID ABC is copied to the External Reference field.

• Copied from Predecessor Invoice ID:
  In case a referenced invoice exists for this document, the Customer Invoice ID is copied to the External Reference field. For example, if you create and save credit memo with ID DEF (DEF stands for newly created ID) for invoice ABC, then the ID ABC is copied to the External Reference field of the credit memo.

• Copied from Predecessor Reference ID:
  The External Reference field in the invoice document contains the value of the External Reference field of the corresponding invoice request. This value is free text and can reference a document from the SAP Business ByDesign system. For example, you have a web shop and prefer to use the order number of the shopping cart as an external reference in your invoices in SAP Business ByDesign.

Since the first option is the default setting, system always copies the Customer Invoice ID to the External Reference. It is the correct system behavior.

This also applies to Credit Memo, Down Payment Requests and Correction Invoice.

Please Note:

Customer Invoice Processing - Manual Invoicing for Invoice Type Invoice with the Predecessor Customer Invoice Exists as false (checkbox not checked) is used for Manual Invoice Request (since there is no predecessor)

Customer Invoice Processing - Manual Invoicing for Invoice Type Invoice with the Predecessor Customer Invoice Exists as true (checkbox checked) is used for External Customer Invoice Request (since it comes from and external system via the web service and therefore has a predecessor).

In case you want to change the default setting, please follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Business Configuration work center.
2. Open the current Implementation Project.
3. Navigate to the Activity List and go to the Fine Tune phase.
4. Find the activity External Reference Number Determination for Customer Invoice. 
5. Add it to your project and open it. 
6. Change the setting and save it.

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