SAP Activity Postings 1: Activity Types Overview

By Tom King

My company began its journey with SAP in 2007. I was a charter member of the FICO team because of my work with product costing.

The first item I encountered was the activity type. Activity types are not cost drivers, but instead allocate costs from cost centers to cost objects.

You create an activity type with transaction KL01 and assign a unit of measure to describe the purpose of the activity as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Create Activity Type Basic Data Tab

In this example, we assign KWH for electricity consumption, or you could assign HR for machine hours.

You next assign a secondary cost element type 43 (internal activity allocation) as shown in Figure 2. 
 

Figure 2 Assign Secondary Cost Element

A cost is identified with the cost element, crediting the sender cost center and debiting the receiver cost object.

You next assign an AType (Activity Type) category as shown in Figures 3 and 4.   

Figure 3 AType Category 1

Figure 4 AType Category 2

The category defines the method you use for planning as described in the red text.

You enter the Price indicator as shown in Figures 5 and 6.
 

Figure 5 Price Indicator 1

The price indicator determines if the actual value is calculated based on actual cost element postings as described in red text.
  

Figure 6 Price Indicator 5

Now that we've defined activity types, let's look at the behaviour of each actual allocation activity category in the following blogs. Since these blogs are about activity type posting, we'll assume all planning is manual. We'll explore each of the 5 categories in detail in the following blogs.

Next blog: Activity Postings 2: Category 1 Activity Types and Posting