SAP Shipment Report

What the shipment report shows

A SAP shipment report answers a simple question that SAP makes surprisingly hard: give me every shipment record, with all the attributes that matter, in one place I can filter and share. On screen, SAP shows one record at a time and splits its attributes across several views. This report flattens all of that into a single Excel sheet, one row per record, with the codes turned into readable labels.

Because the output is a plain sheet, it becomes the starting point for the work people actually do with it: a data-quality review, a cleanup before a migration, a hand-off to an auditor, or a source for a pivot. The value is not just the extract, it is that the extract is complete and consistent every time you run it.

A shipment report is most useful when it lets you see the transport picture across a whole day or lane rather than one shipment at a time. With the header, stages and deliveries flattened together, you can answer the questions that come up at a transport desk: which loads are planned for tomorrow, which carrier is handling a route, which deliveries are still unassigned to a shipment, and whether the planned start and end dates line up with the promised delivery windows. None of that is visible from a single-shipment display; it needs the data in one place.

The SAP tables behind it

A shipment groups deliveries onto a transport. VTTK holds the shipment header: shipment number TKNUM, shipment type, the carrier or forwarding agent and the overall status and planned dates. VTTP holds the shipment items, each pointing to a delivery. VTTS holds the stages, the legs of the journey with their route and shipping type. LIKP is the delivery header, joined from VTTP on the delivery number VBELN, so you can see exactly which deliveries sit on the transport. The report flattens header, items and stages into rows you can filter by carrier, route and date.

The joins are the whole reason this is worth automating. Miss one and the report is subtly wrong; get the key fields slightly off and rows fan out or drop. Doing it once, correctly, and then reusing it is what turns a fragile spreadsheet exercise into a reliable report.

The columns you get

Every column below is a real SAP field, labelled in plain English, with the table it is read from. These are the fields most teams want on a shipment report; a tool like PostNow lets you add or remove columns without touching the underlying join.

Building it yourself: VT03N, SE16 or SQVI

VT03N displays one shipment and VT11 lists shipments, but it is built for planning, not a flat export. SE16 on VTTK and VTTP gives the header and items, matched on the shipment number in Excel, and you still bring in VTTS for stages and LIKP for the delivery details separately. The status and type codes need interpreting into readable states. Assembling a carrier-and-route report that refreshes on demand is a developer task rather than a five-minute export.

None of this is impossible; people do it every month. The problem is that it is manual, easy to get subtly wrong, and stale the moment it is saved. Each refresh means repeating the same exports and the same lookups, and any new column means another round with a developer. For a one-off you can push through it. For a report you run every period, the cost adds up. If you want the general landscape of options first, see our overview of SAP reporting tools and how to get SAP to Excel.

The out-of-the-box way: PostNow's shipment report

PostNow's Report Library already contains this exact report, pre-built. You do not assemble the joins or resolve the texts; that is done for you. You open Excel, log in to postnow.ai from the task pane, pick the shipment report, set your range filters, and run. The governed, joined data lands in the sheet, ready to filter, pivot or share, and you can refresh it whenever you need the latest.

Two things make this different from a SE16 dump. First, it is governed: PostNow enforces your own SAP authorizations, so you only ever see the data you are entitled to, and every row can be traced back to its source. Second, it is repeatable: the same report, the same columns, refreshable on demand, with no ABAP to write or maintain. That is the payoff of teaching the hard version first, then handing you the shortcut.

Filters and selection you'll want

A good shipment report is only as useful as the selection you can put on it. The filters most teams reach for are:

• Shipment range (TKNUM)
• Shipment type (SHTYP)
• Carrier (TDLNR)
• Route (ROUTE)
• Planned dates (DPTBG range)
• Status (STTRG)

You set these once as your selection, then reuse or adjust them each run. Because the selection travels with the report, a monthly extract becomes a single refresh rather than a rebuild.

ECC vs S/4HANA

The shipment tables VTTK, VTTP and VTTS persist in S/4HANA, so a transport report reads the same way on ECC and S/4HANA when it is pulled through standard interfaces rather than wired to a specific screen.

The practical takeaway is that a report built on the tables and read through standard interfaces survives a migration far better than one wired to a specific screen or a custom program. When you eventually move from ECC to S/4HANA, a table-based shipment report keeps working, which is one less thing to rebuild in an already large project.

Frequently asked questions