Post cash discounts @ incoming payment to CO-PA & PCA

Cash discount based of payment terms is realized at the time of incoming payment and could apply to multiple line items in the invoice. So company might expect SAP to distribute these discounts to multiple profitability segments based of the invoice line items. In such requirement, use program SAPF181 to distribute discounts to profitability segments and profit centers derived from invoice. The following are the pre-requisites:

1. Discount account should have a cost element with cost element category “1”.

2. At incoming posting the discount has to be posted to a cost object such as cost center or internal order. You can use OKB9 to determine the object. Do not activate/check profitability segment in OKB9. (This value is distributed to PA and PC based of the invoice using program SAPF181)

3. Maintain PA transfer structure for the discount cost element pointing to the right value field.

At month end run program SAPF181. All costs are cleared from the cost objects and distributed to profitability segments and profit centers proportionately based of the invoice the cash discount belongs to.

Postings to previous fiscal year :)

I know that heading of the document is scary but SAP does allow postings to previous fiscal year. Our GL and AA ledger were inconsistent due to mid year legacy asset load (AS92) and GL load performed in previous year. Run report RAABST02 to find the inconsistencies. With some research, found that you can post to previous year book to correct or adjust these values to reconcile. Weird but true… SAP allows you to post to assets reconciliation accounts only through transaction ABF1 with posting keys 70 – debit and 75 – credit. Use transaction type 100 for posting key 70 and transaction type 200 for posting key 200. These posting keys allows you to post to asset reconciliation accounts only

Plan Activity Price Calculation

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Copying Plan Data

Planning data can be maintained from scratch or copied from previous year. Remember that both can also be done. Yes you can plan for the current budget using version 0 and copy previous year plan to a different version in the current fiscal year.

Transaction: Plan data can be copied using transaction KP97

After copying to the desired version, revaluation can be performed if needed. Revaluation will adjust the plan data based on the consumption and cost percentages defined in the customizing.

Transaction: KPUI: Define Revaluation

Transaction: KSPU: Execute plan revaluation

Activity Independent Cost Planning

In this step, you would load all your plan primary costs that are activity independent. For each cost center, you would plan the costs that doesn’t change by your activity output. These costs are considered to be fixed costs and are planned across costs center and cost elements. These costs can be planned by year and distributed to periods evenly or can be planned by period.

Transaction: KP06

These costs end up as debit postings in the cost centers.

Activity Dependent Cost Planning

In this step you would plan the costs that vary by activity output. For each cost center associated to activity, costs are planned by activity type and cost element. These costs are considered to be variable costs as they are activity dependent. Similar to the earlier step, cost can be planned by fiscal year or by period. This step uses the same transaction as before, but a different layout which includes activity type.

Transaction: KP06

Costs end up as debit postings in the cost centers

Ex: Consider electricity activity type in a utility cost center. You would plan the electricity bill payment costs and it is dependent on the electricity consumption. Such plan values are activity dependent and are planned across cost center, activity type and cost element.

Maintenance Costs

In case of actual costs, maintenance costs flow to cost centers from work orders, In case of plan this can be achieved through internal orders. One internal order has to be created for every valid receiver. This receiver cost center has to be maintained in the settlement rule.

Next step is to plan the maintenance hours by each Internal Order. Sender cost center will be the maintenance cost center and activity is planned across each Order.

Transaction: KPF6

Now plan maintenance costs should be maintained for each Order. These costs are posted to maintenance order apart of the labor hours. To understand the difference between the costs planned earlier and now, labor costs planned earlier are activity dependent costs that debit your order and the maintenance costs that are being planned in the current step are activity independent and will also debit your order.

1. Overhead Costs
1. ◦Costing sheet has to be maintained
2. ◦Overhead rates has to be calculated and maintained

Transaction: KZZ2 – Maintain Overhead rate

Costing sheet created for overhead calculation has to be maintained in the order master data. Following information might help you in calculating planned overhead rate.

Planned Labor Overhead rate = (Planned Labor Overhead Cost in Maintenance Overhead Cost Center / Planned Maintenance labor costs)

Once the Overhead rate is maintained in the costing sheet, plan overhead calculation can be executed

Transaction: KGP4: Execute Overhead Calculation.

Last step is to run the settlement for the internal orders. In this process, all the costs residing in the Order are settled to cost centers (receivers maintained in the settlement rule).

Transaction: KO9G – Order Settlement

Plan Cost Center Activity

This step is important not only for planning, it is mandatory from actual stand point. The plan price maintained or calculated is the base for your material price determination during costing run. It is also a prerequisite to create a work order.

Plan activity is maintained in the sender cost center and activities are linked to the cost centers in this step. If the business is not willing to run plan reconciliation, then plan activity can be maintained manually else, after completing all the necessary steps for planning, plan reconciliation run would automatically populate the plan activity for each cost center. “Equivalence number” determines the ratio of the activity independent costs to be attributed to the activity during the activity plan price calculation.

Transaction: KP26

Activity Dependent Activity planning

In this step activity costs from sender cost centers are planned against receiver cost center and activity type. These costs are variable and activity/cost center relationship is linked between sender and receivers through this step.

Transaction: KP06

Costs end up debit posting in the receiver cost center/activity type and credit posting in the sender cost center/activity type.

For example electricity is utilized across multiple production areas and other areas in the plant. So electricity activity from utility cost center is distributed to the receivers (production costs centers, service costs centers and plant maintenance cost centers etc).

Activity Independent Activity planning

In this step activity costs from sender cost center are planned against receiver cost center. Later at activity plan price calculation, these activity independent costs are distributed to all activity types in the receiver cost center.

It could be confusion/difficult to differentiate all these planning steps. I had explained various options in planning costs,  based on the client requirement, necessary steps can be chosen.

Transaction: KP26

Costs end up debit posting in the receiver cost center and credit posting in the sender cost center/activity type.

Assessment/Distribution Cycle

Plan assessment/distribution cycles has to be maintained for allocating costs between cost centers

Transaction: KSU7

Plan Reconciliation

In this step, any differences between sender cost centers and receiver cost center activities are adjusted/reconciled.

Transaction: KPSI

Cost Splitting

In this step all the costs in the cost center are distributed to the activity types based on the splitting structure maintained in the customizing.

Transaction: KSS4

Plan activity price calculation

Based on all the planning steps done earlier, plan activity price for the activities are calculated. After plan price calculation, KP26 transaction shows you the plan price. All the cost centers planned for COGS has to be completed absorbed and left with no balance.

Transaction: KSPI

Note: Due to the updated plan costs because of iterative calculations, you might reverse and re-run the assessment cycles and Orders. After executing assessments and order settlements, make sure to run the plan price calculation (transaction KSPI).

Key Points

1. Activity type can be excluded from the plan price calculation by maintaining “003” as price indicator in activity master data.
2. For an activity type in plan price calculation, variable price can be determined only using plan activity and variable costs, where as fixed price can be determined either using plan activity or capacity of the cost center and fixed costs.

Other planning tools that can be used in planning costs

1. Periodic reposting
2. Indirect activity allocation

Prerequisites for mixed costing

• Procurement Alternatives should be defined.
• In CK91N, maintain different procurement alternatives. For example, with purchase order as process category, purchasing org and vendor has to be specified. If production is chosen as process category, then either BOM & Routing or Production version has to be specified.
• Define a quantity structure type in customizing.
• Quantity structure type has to be created and assigned to the costing version. The quantity structure type should have “M” as quantity structure category.
• Define mixing ratios for the procurement alternatives in the application as based on the quantity structure type defined above.
• Mixing ratios has to maintained in transaction CK94. This is a master data maintenance activity. Here we need to specify equivalence numbers or percentage by procurement alternatives maintained earlier.
• Assign this quantity structure type to a costing version in customizing
• Carry out material costing using above-defined costing version

Plant Maintenance Integration to FI

When a work order is created, settlement rule is automatically created with cost center as receiver. The functional location assigned to the work order determines the cost center.

Create Work Order: Work Order is created with respect to order type and functional location. Order type determines costing sheet, costing variant and other profiles for the work order, whereas functional location determines the cost center in the work order settlement rule.

When work center is assigned to the work order, plant maintenance control key will default and cost center to which activity cost are to be posted is determined.

When an work order is updated with the components, reservation on stocked materials and purchase req for non stock materials are created.

When activity is confirmed to the work order using CAT2 or IW41, activity hours are charged to the work order (cost receiving object) from activity cost center (cost sending object). In addition goods receipt is also performed.

Periodic processing: All the costs received to the work order has to be settled at month end after overhead calculation. Since overhead exists in the plant across work orders, a costing sheet is maintained with percentage rates to apply overhead to the work orders. Run transaction KGI2 to apply overhead to the work orders. At settlement, actual costs and overhead are settled to the the receiving cost center.

Steps to delete Vendor Master record

This process is helpful and works only if the transaction data doesn’t exist for the vendor accounts that need to be deleted.

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“+/- sign” handling in CO-PA

I am sure that there is already documentation available on this topic at different sources, still this is confusing for many SAP users during implementations. It could be confusing to determine proper usage of this setting and this entry tries to explain its suggested use and implications.

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Capital Investment Order

This is an end user document that explains steps involved in using orders for capital projects.

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Inconsistencies in table T093D – Asset Depreciation

When book depreciation is run as a part of periodic processing, table T093D and TABA are updated accordingly with period and fiscal year information. T093 hold values of recent depreciation period and fiscal year, whereas TABA hold entries for each depreciation run and indicates if a document in FI has been posted or not. With few customizing transactions relevant to depreciation area, table T093D is also transported though this table is not relevent to customizing and is a system dependent. This causes inconsistent values in T093D and possibly could cause error messages when trying to post depreciation or perform year end closing.

To validate, table entries of TABA and T093D should be reconciled and have same last period for which depreciation was posted. If not in such cases, write a code to correct the T093D table entries. Check Note 26073.

Table T093D will get it’s first entry when chart of depreciation is assigned to company code. So do not delete the entry from the table as system would issue error message at the depreciation run.

Above picture shows the initial entry that is created when chart of depreciation is assigned to the co code. Later when assets are loaded and depreciation was run as part of periodic processing, then fiscal year, posted up to, no of posting runs fields are updated accordingly.

Technically this system dependent table shouldn’t be attached to the customizing transport. Hopefully SAP fixes it soon 🙂

MRN9 – Balance sheet valuation at LC

Do we have an option if we want to revaluate inventory with different material prices? Yes SAP has provided an option to re-valuate inventory at different material prices /LIFO/FIFO etc. However I am not going to explain how system would calculate the LIFO and FIFO price (may be next time). You can calculate lowest cost / LIFO /FIFO price for material and revaluate your inventory with the calculated price. However there are few important things to know when using this process to post to inventory accounts.

I have tested this transaction to re valuate inventory at a price maintained manually ( not calculated) in the commercial price field of the material master. Since MRN9 is to revaluate your inventory at lowest cost price, you will not be able to revaluate inventory at a lesser price than standard cost in the material master. If the price in the commercial/ tax price fields is less than standard price, then inventory account is adjusted according.
Configuration has to be maintained in transaction OBYC – account determination. Maintain g/l accounts for transaction UMD and BSD.

Important facts to know…

Your FI and MM will not reconcile as this transaction is purely FI.
Material Ledger is not updated with the new price. Your standard price continues to be in the material master.
Though transaction BSD shows as “inventory posting” similar to BSX, both these do not act same. BSX posts to FI and MM so in material ledger, but BSD just posts to the FI inventory account. To have better reconciliation in FI, maintain similar inventory accounts for both BSX and BSD for each valuation class. This will help in reconciliation and makes sure the inventory adjustment is posted to the right account.
Be sure run it just “ONCE” as system does not recognize if the transaction was already run for the current period.
Posting keys assigned to these transactions doesn’t facilitate to reverse the postings. So if you are planning to reverse these transactions, change the posting keys in account determination to 40 & 50.