Deriving the Credit Control Area Credit and Risk Management in FI/SD

You have four ways of deriving a credit control area:

• Company code
• Sales area (sales organization, distribution channel, division)
  The sales areas can be assigned to a credit control area in Customizing (Enterprise Structure ® Assignment ® Sales and Distribution ® Assign sales area to credit control area).
• Customer master (payer’s sales area segment)
• User exit EXIT_SAPFV45K_001
  You can use this user exit to derive the credit control area from all the fields in the sales order header.

In the last three options, the credit control area must also be assigned to the company code. You do this by going to Customizing and choosing Enterprise structure ® Assignment ® Financial Accounting.

Caution
If you are working with distributed systems, note the following (and also see Credit Management in Distributed Systems):

In distributed systems (centralized Financial Accounting, decentralized sales processing), each decentralized sales computer must be assigned to its own credit control area. In other words, you cannot make multiple assignments for one credit control area.

The alternative credit control areas in the decentralized computer must also be different, which makes the following scenario impossible:

The central Financial Accounting department in your company would like to influence the credit policy for some customers in an international subsidiary that uses a decentralized sales computer. To do this, the centralized and decentralized sales computers would have to belong to the same credit control area. However, this is not permitted for distributed systems because open orders are not distributed between sales computers.

If you post documents directly in FI that are not related to sales and distribution processes, you must enter the credit control area manually as the system doesn’t.

The credit control area is determined in the following sequence:

1. User exit
2. Distribution channel
3. Customer master
4. Company code for the sales organization

You can only change the credit control area if there are no subsequent documents. If you want to change the assignment or make a new one, you have to restructure the credit limit. For more details, see Resetting Credit Limits