G'day Dean, I have also been looking at something similar to this over the last couple of weeks, except it is redirecting part of a customer's entitlement to a third party.
From what I have seen there are two ways of doing it:
- Using the deduct-to-party functionality then apply decision based deductions from a Social Deduction Plan or rule-based deductions from a BAdI - the final recipient is set to the third party in billing and invoicing
- Using the alternative payee functionality which redirects the payment to the third party
I have also been exploring the possibility of combining the two at different stages of processing to avoid getting involved with the revenue distribution functionality. For example Social Services processing uses the deduct-to-party functionality then I map it to an alternative payee at billing time. I am only working on PSCD so I haven't looked back further than the NCD header / item data structure into the Social Services module.
If I understand your scenario correctly then you are talking about granting an additional entitlement to the beneficiary to cove the cost of the service and then redirecting it to the third party for payment for a service, so I guess this is slightly different to what I have been looking into. You could still do it within the same SSP type, it would involve granting an additional entitlement item then sending it to the third party using either the deduct-to-party or alternative payee functionality. Other than saving CPU on reassessments I can't think of any advantages that would come from separating it out into a different SSP type over defining a separate entitlement item (product) type for these payments.