My first post on SAP based on my working knowledge. I’m not a SAP support or developer so there are still lots of unknown to me
There are so many dates in SAP: Baseline date, net due date, invoice date, invoice receipt date, goods receipt date, posting date, clearing date, value date, entry date, etc. Below are my summary of them
Posting date: the date you post a document, invoice, payment or any other documents in SAP. Posting date a logical date used in SAP for financial reporting.
Baseline date: is used to determine invoice’s net due date; It’s configurable to be based on invoice date, goods receipts date or others
Invoice date: the actual date vendor put on their invoice
Invoice receipt date: For three-way matching(PO->Goods receipts->Invoice), you normally have Goods receipts date and invoice receipt date. This date can be found on PO (ME23N) -> Purchase Order History tab
Goods receipt date: when the goods were receipted.
Entry date: is document’s system entry date. It can be used to extract data on daily basis
Net due date: is a calculated field based on Baseline date + terms. I find it’s normally the cash discount days can be added to baseline date to get net due date.
Clearing date: When a payment is made to “clear” an vendor invoice, the date is recorded as “clearing date”. It should be the entry date of the clearing document.
Value date: When a payment is settled by the bank (i.e. money transferred to the vendor’s bank). Note although invoice has a value date field, the actual value date should be taken from the payment doc on the settlement side(double entry here, one vendor account and the the being bank’s settlement account)