Two steps to analyze bad payment terms in SAP

In today’s blog post I would like to show you how you can identify suppliers with no or bad payment terms in SAP, thus enabling you to conduct an audit of your payment terms quickly and efficiently!

Part II of the series: “Payment terms in vendor master data”

1. Are you failing to benefit from cash discounts due to poorly maintained payment terms in SAP?
2. Two steps to analyze bad payment terms in SAP
3. Revised terms of payment: How to clean up your vendor master data
4. How to analyze your own payment behavior in SAP

How to recognize bad payment terms in SAP?

In SAP, payment terms for vendors are not regularly maintained individually, but payment conditions are first created as a master record, and the vendor master record then contains a reference to the payment condition master record. In this way, you have a good overview of the existing payment terms. In a payment condition, you can maintain up to three periods:

• A first period for cash discounts of x%
• A second period for cash discounts of y%
• And a third during which the invoice is payable without deduction.

Suppliers with poorly maintained payment terms can now be defined as follows: 

• A vendor master record has no reference to a payment condition
• A vendor master record has a reference to a payment condition, but the payment condition itself is in some way contradictory. Terms of payment are, for example, contradictory if payment periods of 0 days are maintained and positive discount percentages have been stored for these payment periods. In practice, such discount groups can never be used at all!

How to obtain data for an analysis of the payment terms in your vendor master data?

If you want to analyze payment terms for your vendor master data in SAP, you need the necessary data structures and data from your SAP system. zap Audit automatically extracts all the necessary data from your SAP system. You can download zap Audit free of charge:

How do you perform an analysis of the payment terms in your vendor master data?

In what follows, we will evaluate all suppliers with poorly maintained payment terms.

Step 1: Create a list of suppliers with poorly maintained payment terms

Create a list of suppliers with poorly maintained payment terms.

The SQL query used for this purpose examines all vendor master records (LIFNR field) in table LFB1 (vendor-specific vendor master data) and checks whether a reference to a payment condition exists at all (ZTERM field).

At the same time, it also checks whether the payment condition is appropriately maintained. In the present case, a payment condition would not be meaningfully maintained if all payment periods were maintained with 0 days (ZTAG1, ZTAG2, ZTAG3 fields), but with discount percentages of > 0% defined (ZPRZ1 and ZPRZ2 fields). Because this would mean that one could in theory benefit from a cash discount, but that in practice there is no meaningful payment period in days, which could actually be used.

If you would like to obtain the SQL Query for this analysis, please download our ePaper.


In our example above, we find out that the payment condition ZB05 (ZTERM) has been stored for the vendors (LIFNR) 0000002358 and 0000403619. This payment term is, however, badly maintained, since 3% discount has been stored for the first discount period (ZPRZ1), but the period is 0 days (ZTAG1). There is simply no time for the 3% discount to be used. For vendor 0000002558, you can see that a payment condition has not been stored at all (value null).

Step 2: Audit the suppliers with poorly maintained payment terms

Go through the list from step 1 with the department and clarify why payment terms have not been maintained properly or have not been maintained at all.

In the next blog post of this series, we will tell you what you need to do to clean up your payment terms.