VF06 Billing Jobs

Question

Hi
We trigger the VF06 job (program RV60SBAT) for billing from ESP. This job in turn spawns some child jobs that start with INVOICE* as job name. This is creating a problem to properly monitor the billing job from ESP and also to trigger subsequent jobs that are dependent on billing. Problem is in ESP, the parent billing job shows as complete even when some of the child jobs are still running or go to cancel. How do you deal with this problem in Professional instance?
Expecting early response.
Thanks
Sriram

Answer 1

Hi Sriram
As no doubt you noticed RV60SBAT just reads the billing due index and calls SDBILLDL to
create the billing documents. This is a historical function as SDBILLDL was not background
compatible previously but it is now.
You can schedule you background billing directly with SDBILLDL.
Also for contention issues you can split the activities of billing.
When the billing job runs it does 3 things
1) creates the billing document
2) post the invoices to accounting
3) generates the billing output
Doing all 3 things together with parallel jobs etc is not a good idea and not necessary
To split the 3 activities
- put a posting block on the billing document type in transaction VOFA
- changing the timing of any output from immediate processing to run with a job
1) Create the billing documents with SDBILLDL as a stand alone job
2) Upon completion run RVFAKSPE to Release billing documents for accounting
3) run RSNAST00 or VF31 to create the output afterwards
You can simply manage the timing of the batch schedule and it should not be
necessary to create a custom program to handle this case
I hope this helps you further
Kind regards
Brian