Customer Master Create & Change Approval
Make customer master data unchangeable without approval — protect quality at the source.
What problem does it solve?
Customer master creation and changes happen without control; wrong tax, payment-term or bank data directly jeopardizes billing and collections.
How does the solution work?
Conforcus's customer approval workflow routes creates and changes on critical fields to automatic approval and holds the record in draft until released. A clear before/after value comparison is presented to the approver.
What changes in practice?
Triggering works at field level. Whether the work is done in the classic customer transactions (XD01/XD02) or in Business Partner (BP) maintenance, the approval workflow starts by itself when a new customer record is created or when a field defined as critical, such as tax, payment terms or bank details, is changed. Release control is in force: a value still in draft does not reach billing or collections before it is approved. In a comparison built from change documents, the approver sees the old and new value of the field together and decides on that difference. Changes to fields not defined as critical are saved without entering approval.
Critical fields are protected by the four-eyes principle: the person who enters a change and the person who releases it are different. Who raised the request, which field moved from which value to which, and who approved it and when all stay on record, so an auditor asking who changed a bank detail and who approved it is answered from that record. In daily work, the sales operations team enters the request in the transaction it already uses, and the approver reviews only the difference before deciding. Wrong tax data or a wrong payment term is noticed before the record is released, not after an invoice has gone out.
Benefits
- Faulty customer data is stopped before it reaches billing and collections
- Critical fields — tax, payment terms, bank — protected by four-eyes control
- All master-data changes are audit-ready and fully traceable
Where it sits in SAP
Field-level triggering on customer master (XD01/XD02, BP) create/change, change-document-based before/after comparison, approval workflow and release control. Live across multiple sectors.
Who it is for: Master Data Manager, Sales Operations, Tax & Audit
Frequently asked questions
We maintain customer data through the Business Partner (BP); does the solution work with BP as well?
Yes; triggering works in the classic customer master transactions (XD01/XD02) as well as in Business Partner (BP) maintenance. Because the fields subject to approval are defined at field level, the same critical-field logic applies whichever transaction is used to create or change the record. In either case, changes to fields such as tax, payment terms and bank details wait in draft until approval is complete.
What happens to the customer record while a change is awaiting approval, and can unapproved data reach an invoice?
The record is held in draft until approval is complete, so unapproved data does not reach an invoice. A newly created customer is not opened for use before release, and a change to a critical field on an existing record takes effect only on approval; wrong tax, payment-term or bank data therefore stays out of billing and collections. Fields not defined as critical are updated without approval, so routine corrections do not wait.
What do we have for an audit, and how does it differ from SAP's standard change documents?
Standard change documents record who changed a field, when, and from which value to which, but they do not stop the change and carry no approval information. The solution presents the same change-document data to the approver as a before/after comparison and keeps the record in draft until it is released. The record therefore shows the approver and the approval time alongside the person who made the change, which leaves critical-field changes audit-ready and traceable.