Reconcile SAP CO-PA with General Ledger

By Paul Ovigele

The original purpose of Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) is to enable businesses to produce market segment profitability reports based on sales data. It is particularly useful for  Finance and Sales users as it allows you to perform profitability analysis according to several dimensions (customer, product, country, salesperson etc.) and its real-time functionality helps with quick and effective decision making.

However, one pitfall of the costing-based CO-PA module is the inability to automatically reconcile CO-PA with the General Ledger.

You cannot post a billing document if a CO-PA value field has not been mapped to a condition. Also Transaction KEAT goes some way to performing a reconciliation function, by showing the differences between FI, SD and CO-PA. And you have account-based CO-PA which can help you produce CO-PA reports using accounts and not value fields, and hence allows you make a comparison with costing-based CO-PA reports.

However, none of the above options is a complete reconciliation solution. The billing document check is good, but this is does not deal with any transactions that do not come from a billing document. Also, it does not ensure that the cost of sales value, which is updated at different times in CO-PA and FI, is consistent in both modules. Transaction KEAT is not always completely accurate. I have some clients who say that KEAT creates more confusion as it gives you a different figure than shown in CO-PA and the General Ledger and therefore you end up doing three-way reconciliation as opposed to a two-way one. Account-based CO-PA simply replicates the P&L, therefore it simply shows the same differences with Costing-based CO-PA that you get when comparing the P&L with costing-based CO-PA.

To set up your SAP CO-PA and Margin Analysis correctly our ERPCorp SAP experts are available to assist you.

IWhile there are standard reports and processes that reconcile MM with the General Ledger; Fixed Assets with the General Ledger; and the Controlling Module with Financial Accounting. The latter functionality has been boosted with the New General Ledger as this reconciliation is now possible by using the real-time CO-FI integration option. It is logical that such a tool should exist for reconciling CO-PA.

S/4HANA and its integration with Margin Analysis and SAP Fiori apps, provides a robust solution. However many SAP customers are still using SAP ECC and Costing-Based CO-PA and still need to roconcile CO-PA with the GL.