How to Use Regex in Processing Rules

[Anita_Ahmadpour]

In this blog post, you can find a video that explains in less than 5 minutes how to work with regular expressions (regex) in your processing rules. With the January 2024 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you can use regular expressions to define conditions for memo lines in your processing rules for bank statement processing and lockbox processing.

Have a look at the video:

The following video shows an example case of when it makes sense to use regular expressions in the conditions of your processing rules.

NOTE: The sequences in the following video are taken from an SAP S/4HANA Cloud test system. The UI may look different in your system, depending on your configuration settings.

NOTE: The Additional Conditions are a functionality for users with more advanced knowledge in IT.

In a nutshell:

As shown in the how-to video above, by selecting the Activate Additional Conditions checkbox in your processing rules, you can define additional conditions for the memo lines of your bank statement items or lockbox items. In these additional conditions, you can use regular expressions, thus providing the system with complex search patterns to compare to the memo lines of bank statement items or lockbox items.

Want to know more?

For more information on bank statement processing and lockbox processing in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, have a look at the following links:

• Additional Conditions of Processing Rules
• Overview on Automatic Bank Statement Processing
• Overview on Automatic Lockbox Processing
• Manage Processing Rules - For Bank Statements
• Manage Processing Rules - For Lockbox
• How to Create Processing Rules

Any questions or comments?

If you have any questions, feedback, or comments, please don’t hesitate to post them in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

[Bohdan]

@Anita_Ahmadpour , thank you for an overview ! I have mixed feelings about this feature. On one hand, I agree that introduction of REGEX to reprocessing rules is definitely a nice improvement. On the other hand, reprocessing rules are supposed to be maintained by (key) users. Over the last, 10 years I worked with different users. Some of them had baseline knowledge, others (i.e. key users) were very proficient in SAP. But even those who were the most proficient were struggling with maintenance of the reprocessing rules. So far I did not met even one key user who would have any idea what is REGEX. I would even venture to say that no even all SAP functional consultants know what it is and how to setup the REGEX.

Therefore, the only way I can see how this functionality can be utilized is this: key users will submit service tickets, support team will review them and will provide the recommendations to key users or will maintain the rules themselves. Therefore, the whole idea of user-managed users is kind of compromised.

Regards,

Bohdan

[Edrilan_Berisha]

Hi @Bohdan,

I do absolutely agree with you. It's good to also get feedback from the fields. I am also not fully happy with our implementation here. I could imagine that we make use of LLM like ChatGPT etc. to make it more user friendly. Or we implement something like a wizard where the end user can select from pre-defined "blocks" like:

Search for <Input1>, which starts with <Input2> and ends with <Input3>.

And he could maybe re-arrange and select this whole sentence and also make use of "exclude" and other "blocks" and then in the <Input1> for instance select "Number" or "Character" etc. in <Input2> then enter whatever he is looking for and so on.

So any idea on how we could make that user-friendly and understandable is of appreciated!

Best,

Edrilan Berisha

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Financials Development

[Anita_Ahmadpour]

@Bohdan 

Hi Bohdan,

Thank you very much for your feedback. And yes, the way it stands right now, that feature is targeted towards users with more advanced knowledge in IT.

We shall take the points from your feedback and discuss it in our development team to improve the feature and make it easier to use. Thank you again for reaching out.

Best regards,

Anita

[Victor_Alvarez]

Dear Anita.

It would be also nice (as in OnPrem) to have a Cloud BADI for a completely customized algorithm.

Thanks.

[MalgorzataS]

Hi Anita

I have few questions:

1) Is the syntax for REGEX the same as it is for search strings in on-prem?

2) Where can the information on supported syntax and special characters be found? REGEX is not fully standardized between programming languages.

3) I assume the regex is only able to check if pattern is hit. There are no options to take some values and use e.g. in posting text, using # special characters. Is this correct?

Thank you for help!

Malgorzata

[Anita_Ahmadpour]

@Victor_Alvarez - Hi Victor, 

Thank you for your comment. If you have any feature requests or improvement requests, we recommend you to have a look at the SAP Continuous Influence programme. That is the official channel to submit your requests, wishes and ideas. For more information, see: https://www.sap.com/about/customer-involvement/influence-adopt.html .

Best regards,

Anita

[Edrilan_Berisha]

Hi Malgorzata,

your questions related to REGEX itself. There is a blog post describing the syntax and the special characters: https://community.sap.com/t5/application-development-blog-posts/regular-expressions-regex-in-modern-...

Related to the question about the scope of this feature. Your assumption is correct, that is currently not possible with this feature. The REGEX feature is only used to match a certain pattern and find those open invoices.

Best,

Edrilan Berisha

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Financials Development