AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Revolutionizing SAP Payment Reconciliation with EPI-USE ERP PAY on AWS
By Archana Kuppuswamy, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Christopher Belford, Sr. Executive – EPI-USE Payment Services
By Marcel van der Merwe, Associate Partner – EPI-USE Payment Services
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In this post, we will explore how EPI-USE ERP PAY provides end-to-end automated reconciliation to SAP with a consolidated view on all external digital payment touchpoints in the organization.
The AWS SDK for SAP ABAP exposes many additional AWS services to SAP customers which extend supplementary financial use cases. It enables EPI-USE ERP PAY to utilize numerous revenue operations functions like multi-merchant transaction tracking, fraud detection, control over voids, refunds, and other reconciliation challenges.
The modern digital payment acceptance landscape is disparate and multi-disciplined. Managing reconciliation for SAP accounts receivable and the multitude of digital payment technologies available in the market can be cumbersome, manual, and disconnected.
These requirements form part of a business-as-usual mindset for multiple lines of business in the enterprise who need to deliver the convenience of digital payment acceptance to their customers. It’s not uncommon for requirements to be further subject to change from different areas of the business. This scenario ultimately leads to various and often different payment solutions to be implemented across the business.
This approach does not scale or replicate well and doesn’t enable finance departments to extend services easily to new payment services as customer self-service expands. Over time, it leads to several contracts with Payment Service Providers (PSPs) as well as reconciliation challenges for the finance department, compliance challenges, and even potential opportunities for fraud.
EPI-USE ERP Pay is designed and built by EPI-USE Payment Services to address these challenges for SAP clients without the need to change Payment Service Providers or introduce additional software in the client landscape.
The AWS SDK for SAP ABAP supports SAP NetWeaver ABAP version 7.4 and above, both through self-managed deployments and RISE with SAP. SAP Private Cloud Edition and RISE with SAP customers can leverage the ERP PAY services and the AWS SDK by utilizing the SAP PrivateLink service on the Business Technology Platform connected to AWS PrivateLink using Cloud Foundry.
This also includes SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP ERP 6.0 EHP 7, SAP BW 7.4, SAP Solution Manager 7.2, and more.
EPI-USE is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that’s an SAP Gold Partner and excels in implementing, migrating, and managing SAP in the cloud.
Business Challenge
Often, digital payment touchpoints and requirements for each line of business service vary by department. Thus, managing the flow and reconciliation of transactions into SAP for multiple PSPs and merchant accounts can be manual and cumbersome. The ability to answer customer queries, identify specific transactions, and manage exceptions can be onerous and complex. Tracking and safeguarding against fraud for inbound and outbound payments in high volume accounts receivable and payable scenarios also presents challenges.
Fraudulent transactions can result in significant financial losses, which can impact the company’s bottom line and overall financial health as well as do significant reputational damage. Early real-time detection of potential fraud is key to limit or prevent fraudulent transactions in the organization, but these solutions can be complex to implement and maintain.
ERP PAY allows clients to extend their digital payment channels with considerably more automated control. It allows finance departments to facilitate business requirements without having to take on additional day-end and month-end reconciliation tasks. It provides a platform for management by exception rather than having to actively bridge disparate digital processes.
Solution Overview
EPI-USE ERP Pay integrates payment service providers to extend card and automated clearing house payments and digital wallets (Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Visa Checkout, Masterpass) with referencing that’s tailored for SAP Finance in the cloud and on-premises.
Utilizing the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, this solution provides an automated and integrated bridge between transaction processing and core accounting, including support for ancillary functionality like refunds and voided payments.
Figure 1 – ERP Pay solution overview.
ERP PAY provides the capability to manage the flow of transactions from any payment service provider or payment instrument into SAP Finance Accounts Receivable.
In environments that are accepting payments from multiple service providers and merchant accounts, the day-end requirements for each account against specific general ledger (GL) numbers becomes an onerous manual task. It creates difficulty scheduling batches on SAP and requires excessive intervention by finance personnel.
Alongside the core financial functions, the ability to track down customer payments and manage services like refunds and voids in day-to-day business is also challenging and cumbersome.
The AWS ABAP SDK for SAP is used to connect to ERP PAY and, in turn, the external digital payment acceptance systems and processes to standard SAP Accounts Receivable workflow. The solution is agnostic to PSPs and is capable of implementing numerous payment instruments across a spectrum of service providers.
The extension into AWS cloud services offers a host of different financial services products like AWS payment cryptography, credit decisioning, account onboarding, and fraud detection which can be leveraged from within SAP. This simplifies the integration and presents a rich set of ancillary functionalities that are useful in SAP Financial workloads.
Additionally, EPI-USE ERP Pay allows integration from SAP Finance to Amazon Fraud Detector to identify potentially fraudulent activities and catch online fraud faster.
By embedding fraud detection into the accounts payable workflow, ERP PAY offers a last line of defense prior to posting to the bank. Interrogating the payment files destined for the bank, Amazon Fraud Detector will flag suspect payments and ERP PAY will send them for re-evaluation within the accounts payable workflow.
Solution Architecture with SAP
The architecture of ERP Pay is modular and elastic; customers can deploy the reconciliation, fraud detection, and transaction oversight according to their specific needs and financial workflows.
Figure 2 – Solution Architecture with SAP.
ERP PAY core modules are deployed to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and provides extensions to all payment endpoints, enriching transactions with metadata and automatically posting those transactions to the appropriate accounts receivable general ledgers. The solution allows for bi-directional integration to SAP, enabling line of business applications to associate transactions with the correct contract accounts and business partners numbers.
Figure 3 – AWS ABAP SDK with ERP Pay.
ERP PAY leverages Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to allow for transactional message flow between payment service providers, card processors, and Automated Clearing House networks through ERP PAY and directly into SAP.
Messaging allows for SAP to track a transaction from authorization through to funding events with the customer’s bank. All of this is done from within the SAP environment and without having to manually interact with third-party payment provider reporting or manually posting day-end transactions.
Installation of the SDK is suitable for SAP deployed on-premises or in the AWS cloud.
Figure 4 – ERP PAY and Amazon Fraud Detector.
Complex fraud detection models are available through Amazon Fraud Detector, and the integration to SAP is made simple with the ERP Pay and ABAP SDK for SAP. Fraud detection can be inserted into the accounts payable process and provide a continued defense against outbound fraud payments.
Amazon Fraud Detector on ERP Pay benefits include:
- Continuous learning and improvement of advanced AWS machine learning models.
- Real-time fraud detection and potential identification of fraudulent transactions.
- Scalability to grow the solution and include both inbound and outbound payment transactions in the future.
- Customizable fraud rules as well as AWS rules.
- Fraud insights and reporting.
Example Use Cases
Higher Education
Universities and colleges provide numerous digital payment services to their students. The requirements for these services are unique per departments and can include different digital touch points to receive payments.
As requirements are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, different student-facing applications are deployed across the landscape. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, as well as SAP, are used to provide end-to-end solutions to students.
Examples of required payment applications include:
- Student fees
- Books and stationery
- Parking
- Student card top-up
- Corporate sponsorship
- Donations
Financial controllers and administrators need to extend payment services to all these applications whilst still retaining centralized administration and financial control and reducing or completely eliminating suspense accounts.
Universities can use ERP Pay for SAP on AWS to address these requirements while still providing best-of-breed solutions to their students. Various enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SaaS systems are integrated with ERP Pay to ensure payments are reconciled in SAP Finance in real-time. The school’s finance team has access to combined financial reporting across all payment end points with full referencing for transactions between SAP and the merchant bank accounts.
Healthcare Providers
Hospitals and clinics provide digital payment services to their patients for a variety of goods and services. The community around the healthcare providers includes many different touchpoints which require centralized administration and automated reconciliation.
Some of these services include:
- Patient pharmaceutical and medical supplies
- Consultation fees
- Parking
- Out-of-scheme payments
- Admission deposits
ERP Pay facilitates the real-time reconciliation of payment transaction directly to SAP, allowing healthcare professionals to provide services and release critical prescriptions and medication correctly referenced and time sensitive.
Local Government
State, county, and municipalities provide a large variety of digital payment acceptance for critical services in the community. Having the ability to centralize the management of all transactions across multiple PSPs and merchant accounts, local government need to be able to reconcile directly to ERP and service customer queries refunds and other payment anomalies.
ERP Pay can bring together many disparate business disciplines and unify the visibility for finance departments whilst providing improved compliance and fraud prevention.
Retail and Ecommerce
Online ecommerce environments with multiple departments can have confidence in releasing merchandise to customers knowing the money has been reconciled to ERP in real-time. To release goods in a timely fashion, wholesalers and retailers need to know when payments have been processed successfully. ERP Pay provides visibility across the entire landscape in an aggregated fashion, assisting with revenue forecasting, velocity metrics, and automated reconciliation.
With the added benefit of fraud detection, new account onboarding and transactional fraud can be detected prior to the release of goods or services. ERP Pay can significantly reduce manual processing and allow financial controllers faster access to problem transactions and the tooling to resolve them.
Summary
EPI-USE ERP Pay provides enterprises with full, transaction-level visibility, traceability, and compliance across the digital payment landscape. ERP Pay provides the capability to manage the flow of transactions from any payment service provider or payment instrument into SAP Finance.
Customers can extend digital payment channels with considerably more automated control and allow finance departments to facilitate business requirements without having to take on additional day-end and month-end reconciliation tasks.
EPI-USE has assisted numerous clients to optimize and improve their enterprise landscape, and now with ERP Pay on AWS customers can benefit from the optimization of their digital payment landscape.
Contact the EPI-USE Payment Services team at info.eps@epiuse.com to learn more about ERP Pay and other payment solutions for your enterprise. You can also learn more about EPI-USE in AWS Marketplace.
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EPI-USE – AWS Partner Spotlight
EPI-USE is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and MSP that’s a SAP Gold Partner which excels in implementing, migrating, and managing SAP in the cloud.