How to Reconcile SAP Cost Based CO-PA and GL

By Elitza Alexandrova

Why should we worry about reconciling costing based SAP Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) to the GL? After all, GL is the book of record from an external reporting stand point.

However, CO-PA has several advantages that the GL does not provide. For example, CO-PA can give us details on revenue and cost of sales (COS) split by sales order, product line, customer, etc. as opposed to the GL, which gives us only total revenue and total COS. CO-PA allows us to drill down to the details of a company’s profitability – customer, product line, which can be especially useful when forecasting future sales/COS. Therefore, CO-PA is an important financial tool; however for it to be accurate, we need procedures to reconcile and explain differences between CO-PA and the GL. 

Updating Quantity Fields in CO-PA

By Paul Ovigele

Table of Contents

1. Assigning Quantity fields from Sales Documents

2. Assigning Quantity Fields from Manufacturing Orders

3. Assigning Quantity Fields from FI Documents 

When you are using SAP Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) you know that mapping objects to value fields is the key to ensuring that the reports are complete and accurate. The normal scenario is to assign amount fields such as sales conditions, general ledger accounts and production variances.

However, it is also important to map quantity fields such as sales and production quantities to value fields (which are set up with a “quantity” attribute in transaction KEA6). Most sales and contribution margin reports contain these quantity values (for example Net Weight of products sold) in order provide the appropriate context for the reported revenue and cost of sales figures.

There are three main areas where you can make assignments to quantity fields in CO-PA.

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Attributed Profitability Segment - SAP S/4HANA

By Anand Seetharaju

Characteristics from a profitability segment can be read and posted to income statement line items based on the best guess principle. This feature was introduced in account-based CO-PA (now Margin Analysis) in S/4HANA 1610. You can use drill-down reporting on posted data. Without attributed profitability segments, you must wait until month-end activities such as settlement, allocation and top-down distribution. With the new feature, you can achieve real-time profitability reporting during the month.