In the Billing Schema we use presort key 0002 most of the times without understanding the impact. this document shows how different pre-sort keys provided by SAP affect the display of the document line items in the invoice. short link to sapisurdg.wordpress.com to be provided shortly.

1. Pre-sorting Overview
Presorting key 0002 has been used by most of us while defining our schema in the Billing master
data. Most of us do know what a presorting key does but still we continue to use 0002 most of the
times. The idea of this post is to show how a different presorting key can affect the display of the line
items in an invoice, in other words the use of the appropriate presorting key should depend on the
business requirements. More on this can be found here.
First what a presorting key does? It groups together line items that are written by variants with the
same presorting key into one block. The blocks are then sorted based on the presorting key and
processed for invoicing. So pre-sorting keys are used for sorting the billing items before printing.
We can have a tax line items also generated and also have a subtotal as output (based on the
configuration) and we use them in billing schema. At least one block (generated by the presorting key)
should have subtotal as output because this is essential for bill print.
If you do not want to output the subtotals, you must deactivate the posting-relevant in the billing
schema for the basic billing lines. The billing simply generates the comparison or information bill lines.
If the subtotal is suppressed for posting-relevant billing lines, an invoicing error would
occur Difference for tax clearing too large. This is because the suppressed VAT does not match the
tax that was posted.
You can calculate a subtotal for information lines to output the tax too.
The configuration settings can be found here.
Customizing Path
The standard settings given by SAP are below.
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2. Standard SAP entries
So in my example rate I am using Presorting key
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•
0002 Sort by Contract for Energy Price 000001 line item
0005 Sort by Device for IQUANT line item.
Below is the screenshot of the schema step showing the same!
Presorting key assigned in Schema
Now my example has 2 contracts having 2 devices. Rate is simple having just the QUANTI01 variant.
Idea is to check how the line item of 000001 and IQUANT get stacked up in the billing line items.
2 Contracts and 2 Devices
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3. As we can see below for line item 00001 having presorting key 0002 we have the sorted lines based
on contracts. We see additional line of ‘SUBT’ cause of the unchecked checkbox for ‘NS’. (Check the
customizing screenshot).
For IQUANT line item with presorting key 0005 we can see that the sorting has been done based on
the devices. No subtotal in this case has the checkbox had been checked. Point to note is that the
sorting happens
1. Based on the presorting key i.e. 0002 sorting happens before 0005. Groups are created with the
same presort key. These groups are listed alphabetically in the print document.
2. The sorting also takes care of the order in which the object is coming in. So contract 909 is before
910.Device 10004200 is before 10004201.
Groups are created within a presort key, according to VAT code. The VAT codes are listed
alphabetically in the print document. Billing lines without a VAT code are listed at the start of a bill
group. After each bill group, the VAT is calculated for the whole group and listed at the end.
Presorting Key in Action
Hope I could make my point clear. Anyways there are additional checks which can be done in this
customizing, probably subject for my next post on this topic. :)
If you need your own custom sorting technique check out function group E21J.
Cheers !! :D
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