When SAP S/4HANA Meets Stripe: Seamless Accounting through Innovative Interfaces

The world of IT services continually offers new opportunities to optimise and enhance business processes. An example is our new project for SALESIANER MIETTEX GmbH. The focus: interfaces. In this blog post, we provide an insight into how we tackled the challenges and integrated the innovative interface solution to ensure payment transactions occur seamlessly via SAP S/4HANA.

SALESIANER MIETTEX is on an innovative path. One of the many services they offer is Linen2Go. This is a container from which rental linen can be borrowed. SALESIANER MIETTEX offers its end customers a convenient payment system via a mobile app. The challenge was to efficiently integrate the transaction data from the external payment service provider, in this case, Stripe, into the SAP S/4HANA system.

This is where our customised interface solution comes into play. The goal was clear: all customer billing documents should be recorded in SAP, making them available for accounting and controlling for reporting.

SAP S/4HANA Meets Stripe API

The direction was clear. The architecture of our interface solution had to be designed to ensure a secure and reliable data exchange between the SAP S/4HANA system and the payment service provider Stripe. This is achieved through the Stripe API. All data is retrieved via this.

The actual connection to this is made from the SAP PI/PO (Process Integration / Process Orchestration). The events object determines which data needs to be retrieved since the last successful import. The emphasis is on 'successful'. If errors occurred, the corresponding data is retrieved again. This not only ensures that all data is indeed transferred, but also that the overall data transfer is minimised.

The import process is automated every evening. To ensure smooth accounting, this process includes several steps:

1. Invoice Import: New invoices are imported. If the customer does not yet exist in the system, they are created beforehand, and the invoice is imported afterwards.
2. Credit Note Import: New credit notes are checked and imported.
3. Payout Import: Payouts of amounts from Stripe to the linen rental provider are imported automatically.

Several general principles underpin this to ensure reliable integration:

• Automatic Retry on Errors: As mentioned above, if an error occurs, an automatic attempt is made to import the erroneous items during the subsequent import.
• Avoidance of Duplicates: If an object already exists in the SAP S/4HANA system, it is not imported again to prevent duplicates.
• Monitoring via Application Log (SLG1): Monitoring is conducted through the application log, which allows access to the relevant SAP transactions and the opening of data in Stripe.
• Compressed Storage of Request & Response Data: For efficient error analysis, the transferred data can be stored in a compressed format in the SAP S/4HANA system and accessed when needed.
• Manual Import if Needed: Of course, there is the option to manually perform the import of individual objects. Here too, it is not possible to create duplicates.

With Testing and Customer Proximity to the Goal

As with all developments, we at SRB value a transparent development process with our customers. Progress was regularly coordinated, and joint testing took place during the development phase.

Technically, the project was managed with support from GitHub. Bugs, feedback, and design decisions were documented there.

The result is impressive: our interface solution not only provides efficient integration of payment transactions into the SAP S/4HANA system but also offers transparent and user-friendly monitoring and analysis. The seamless connection between the payment service provider Stripe and SAP S/4HANA significantly optimises our customer's accounting.

If you are also looking for solutions to improve your business processes, we are at your service. Contact us for more information or a tailored consultation!