As shared in a previous blog, it is possible to create custom sales order types in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. This new innovation provides greater flexibility to fulfill customer business requirements in the Order‑to‑Cash process.

In this blog, I will share another real business use case and explain how to utilize custom sales order types to address customer requirements.

Supply company XYZ sells various products to customers. For certain high-value orders, the company requires customers to make a down payment before the products are delivered. To support this, a billing plan must be enabled on the sales order so that the down payment amount can be defined directly in the order.

According to the flexible item category determination (see detail in help), customer's requirement can be fulfilled by decision table in BRF+ to determine the item category according to certain criteria. However, company XYZ prefers a separate sales order type to differentiate the normal sales process from the down payment sales process, while keeping the configuration clean and maintainable.

Let’s see how a custom sales order type fulfills this requirement.

Assume you are on SAP CBC and have already completed the activities “Define Scope” and “Set Up Organization Structure”. Open the activity “Configure Standard Order Type” to define a new custom sales order type.

Create a new custom sales order type by copying the standard type template XTA. Name the new type ZDP for the down payment sales process.

Save and confirm the custom sales order type. Then deploy the new custom sales order type to SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud.

Wait until the deployment is complete.

Once the custom sales order type ZDP is deployed, you need to configure the default item category for ZDP. Open the activity “Configure Your Business Processes” and search for SSCUI 102807 “Assign Item Categories”.

In SSCUI 102807, the default the item category is TAN, which is copied from standard order type OR.

Change the item category CBAO as the default item category for sales order type ZDP. Item category CBAO has billing plan type 90 (down payment) enabled, which allows a billing plan to be maintained at the item level in the sales order.

Save the configuration.

Now log on with user “Internal Sales Representative” and open the app “Create Sales Order”. Create a sales order with custom sales order type ZDP.

Add a sales order item. The system automatically determines item category CBAO for the item.

Navigate to the Billing Plan tab at the item level. You can see the billing plan tab is active, and you can define the down payment amount directly on the sales order item.

Save the sales order. 

Let’s compare with the standard sales order type “OR”. Create a sales order with order type OR and add an item.

The system determines item category TAN for the item.

Navigate to the item detail — there is no Billing Plan tab available for standard item category TAN.

This confirms that the down payment billing plan is available for the custom order type ZDP by default. 

The introduction of custom sales order types is a significant innovation that greatly enhances flexibility in the Order‑to‑Cash process. It allows customers to define their own sales processes with minimal configuration effort to support different sales scenarios and process patterns.

By combining a custom sales order type with a tailored item category assignment, company XYZ can now clearly differentiate between normal sales orders and down payment sales orders — with the billing plan automatically activated for the right process. This reduces configuration complexity while giving the business the process control it needs.

Please stay tuned for more custom sales order type use cases, and feel free to submit your requirements through the Customer Influence Portal to help us prioritize our product roadmap.