I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in SAP on an address screen. Hundreds? Thousands? And each time I’ve glossed over the “PO Box” address fields. I’ve never been very interested in them — never had to. But the other day a client asked me a question about them and I finally got the opportunity to look under the hood a bit.
No matter which address screen you’re on — customer, vendor, sales order, PO — you’ll see a print preview button.
As you might expect, clicking this button will reveal a pop-up showing exactly what the address will look like when appearing on output with that partner. Makes sense. But, what’s the deal with the PO Box fields? Why are they kept separate? And what happens when the normal street and house number fields are maintained along with those PO Box fields?
The PO Box field behaves differently from the normal street/house number fields. When maintaining this field, you do not have to input “PO Box”; you just need to input the actual box number. Please note that you can expand this section to revel additional fields, such as PO Box City, PO Box Region, PO Box Country, etc.
SAP will add the “PO Box” label automatically. You can experiment with this feature using the print preview function.
But what happens when BOTH sets of fields are maintained? Well, in true consultant form, that depends. Pull up the Print Preview pop-up window. You will notice a ‘Change Parameters’ button on the bottom. When you click this you will see another pop-up with some additional settings — one of which is called ‘_____’. This setting has two options:
- Street takes priority
- PO Box takes priority
The SAP default takes the PO Box as priority but can be changed on a per-partner basis or on a document-by-document basis.
All-in-all, this isn’t an earth-shattering reveal. I just think it’s remarkable how broad SAP is and how much logic there is built in — even into something so seemingly insignificant.
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