Conditions have many uses in SAP.  The easiest to understand or to relate to is usually in Pricing, where conditions are used to specify the many components of a price (base price, surcharges, discounts, freight, taxes etc).  These components may differ for different customers, materials, regions - in fact they may differ in a lot of ways depending on the particular businesses requirements. We may give a customer in West Australia a better price or discount for a product than a customer in NSW for example.

We start with a procedure which I think of as a "spreadsheet".  This "spreadsheet" tells the system the calculations to do and the order in which to do them to calculate the final price or cost of an order item.  Each type of calculation is specified by a condition type.   In other words the condition type is simply telling the system what kind of calculation to do (a flat amount or a percentage for example).  It does not in itself say what numbers to use.

When an order is entered into the system, the system knows a whole lot of information (everything it can get from the customer master, the material master and whatever was entered on the order itself).

It first works out which procedure to use (using procedure determination configuration).  Then for that procedure, it needs to look up what numbers to use for the calculations in the "spreadsheet".  IE: what prices apply here, what discounts, what taxes for this customer, material etc.

For each condition type (or calculation type), there can be lots of records in the system with numbers (e.g.: lots of different prices).  The system needs to know which is the right record (or price) and in which order should it look for the right record.  The configuration lets us specify an "access sequence" for each condition type.  The access sequence tells the system in what order to should "access" or look for records.

For example for the 'PRICE' condition type it may have the following order:

So the system will first look in table 100 which is keyed by region and material, and will look last in table 200, which is keyed just by material.   Each condition table will have some condition records (master data).  For example table 100 may have:

Table 120:

Table 200:

For a condition record to be the 'right' record, the information in the order, customer master or material master must match the key of the record.  If not then the system will go on to check the next table.

A similar lookup is then done for each condition type. E.g.: the discount condition could specify various percentage discounts.

TAX APPLICATION

For the tax condition type, it is most likely that the tax classification fields on the customer and material master would be used as keys for the tax condition records.