House Banks in S/4HANA – Change in SAP’s

Approach
201337,393
Date: Aug/19/2017. Author: Harsha Yedla
Intended Audience: SAP consultants, SAP super users and SAP support users.
Keywords: SAP, S/4HANA, House Banks.
Notes: Screenshots and system specific details are from S/4HANA 1610.

SAP defines a House Bank as the bank your company has account with. House Banks are used for outgoing
and incoming payment processes involving vendor and customer payments. They are also used in bank
transfers, bank statement processing and other Cash Management processes. A House Bank is different from
the bank that we use on customer/vendor master. House Bank, unlike the customer/vendor bank, is assigned to
a company code, has a bank ID, and every account in that House Bank has an account ID. Bank Directory,
House Bank, Customer/vendor bank and associated bank accounts are key aspects of Bank Master
maintenance in SAP. Figure-1 shows how they relate in S/4HANA.

Figure 1 – Bank Master setup in S/4HANA

The key difference between ECC and S/4HANA is the ability to now setup Account ID for Business Partner
(customer/vendor) bank master data and how this Account ID maintenance is now de-linked from House Bank
setup. Let’s dig deeper into these differences and see how they impact bank maintenance process overall.
House Banks setup in S/4HANA
Typical approach and a natural course of action for any SAP-professional is to start with IMG customizing as
shown in figure-2.

Figure 2 – IMG path for House Banks

However, the moment one clicks this ‘Define House Banks’ IMG node, SAP shows an error message as shown
in figure-3.
Figure 3 – Error when using ‘Define House Banks’ node in IMG

I find it most irritating when SAP kicks you out all the way back to the SAP main menu screen if one clicks on
“Exit”. Nevertheless, if a curious user clicks the long text, SAP provides further details (see figure-4) as to why
this IMG node cannot be used.
Figure 4 – IMG error message for House Banks

I was pleased to see not a cryptic one-liner but a well written grammatically correct explanation for the error
message. Sadly, SAP does not provide any indication about considering House Banks as master data and not as
customizing. And it also does not provide any notes on transport related impacts.

Change in Approach
With introduction of Fiori, SAP directs managing House Banks using Bank Account Management Fiori app
(see Table-1 below). In the Fiori app, one can setup House Banks, Account IDs for those House Banks, G/L
Account for each of those Account IDs and other technical details. What I call, the complete setup. In this
approach, SAP treats the House Bank setup as Master Data and not as a customizing setting. And so there is no
question of transport. SAP does not show the customizing transport screen when we save the House Bank
setup in the Fiori app. This was not the case in pre-S/4HANA versions of SAP. In ECC, House Bank setup is
considered customizing requiring the changes to be saved to a transport. The process was clean and straight
forward. One starts in IMG, creates House Bank and Account IDs, saves them to a transport and moves the
transport across environments to sync-up the setup across all systems. In ECC, House Banks are setup in
customizing and customer/vendor bank directory is setup as master data. SAP changed this approach with
S/4HANA for reasons unknown.

This raises questions about consistent process for bank master data maintenance, control, consistency of House
Bank setup between SAP environments, risk of unwanted users having access to view and/or change
company’s bank account details and need for additional security considerations. If not properly addressed, this
could quickly get out of hand.

Alternative to the Fiori app approach is to use GUI transaction based approach. In this approach, we can use a
GUI transaction FI12_HBANK to maintain the House Banks and transport those changes. However, when
using GUI transaction based approach, one quickly realizes that there is no way to add Account IDs and
associated settings to the House Bank, which totally undermines the GUI transaction based approach.

I do not see the point in just creating the House Bank shell and transporting it across environments and so
sticking with Fiori app approach is the best way forward.

It is also interesting to note that SAP now allows creating Bank Account master (Account ID) for
customer/vendor banks (see Figure-1). These are different from the Bank Account IDs created for House
Banks. Figure-5 below shows relevant bank related tables with their key field linkages.
Figure 5 – Important tables pertaining to Bank maintenance

One can quickly note that SAP introduced FCLM_BAM* tables which now store the bank account related
data. FCLM_BAM_AMD table specifically stores the Bank Account Master data. So, based on this setup, it
becomes clear that one can create a Bank Account that is not associated with a House Bank and then decide
create a House Bank for the Bank Master and then link that House Bank to the Bank Account.

It is also interesting to note that SAP does not provide the functionality to select these non-house-bank
accounts in the customer/vendor master data setup. There is no validation of account numbers entered on the
business partner master data with those setup as part of bank maintenance (stored in FCLM_BAM_AMD
table). If there is a business need for such a validation, we have to depend on enhancements to standard
working. This could be a potential improvement in upcoming S/4HANA versions.

Optimal Maintenance Process in S/4HANA

Start with Fiori app ‘Manage Banks’ (note: this is different from ‘Manage House Banks’ app. See Table-1).
Here one can create a Bank Master record. This will create a record in BNKA table. In the same app one can
also decide whether to create this bank as a House Bank. If created as a House Bank, this will create a record
in T012 table. Since the ‘Manage Banks’ app does not allow creating Bank accounts, one has to switch to
‘Manage Bank Accounts’ app. This app will list, assuming there is data, all the Bank Accounts along with their
House Bank, where available. If there is no House Bank associated with the bank account, that field will show
as blank. From this app, one can create a new Bank Account and associate it with a House Bank where needed.
If for some reason, the Bank Master records is not setup as a House Bank, this ‘Manage Bank Accounts’ app
provides a detour to ‘Manage House Banks’ app. But this should be more of an exception process and not a
norm. Figure-6 below shows the flow of optimal bank maintenance process that should be easy to implement
and follow on an on-going basis.
Figure 6 – Optimal Bank maintenance process

As the adage goes, there are many ways to skin a cat. Company’s business process need might force them to
adopt a different process for maintaining banks. However, this is process shown in figure-6 should minimize
the need to switch between multiple apps and thus provide an optimal way to maintain banks and their
accounts.