ERPCorp SAP FICO Blog

If you experience long run-times during SAP Material Ledger close, this blog is for you. We explore how to expedite your SAP Material Ledger close.

Knowing how much your products cost is essential to determining actual profitability. Yet most decisions are based on the standard cost of your products since it is not easy to determine your actual costs. Actual costing by SAP Material Ledger bridges this gap. It provides you the ability to capture actual costs by tracking variances at the material level. Let's examine SAP Actual Costing.

GR/IR is the SAP process to perform the three-way match – purchase order, material receipt, and vendor invoice.  You use a clearing account to record the offset of the goods receipt (GR) and invoice receipt (IR) postings.  Once fully processed, the postings in the clearing account balance. 

Learn more about GR/IR and other SAP FICO topics. Please visit our new SAP FICO Learning Center please click here.

Clearing is performed at the purchase order (PO) line item level based on quantity entered. Price variance and exchange rate variance are calculated.  You can write off small differences using transaction MR11.

Purchase Price Variance
This discussion assumes you are using standard price control (S)  for purchased materials. The quantity and amount on the GR and IR postings are important. You must have posted GR to record purchase price variance (PPV). There is no PPV posting for just IR. There can be additional variance postings on IR after GR is posted for differences between PO price and actual price paid.

When posting GR, the price variance is based on the PO price, unless IR has already been posted, then it is based on actual price paid. If IR has already been posted, the GR will be based on the IR up to the quantity of the IR, after that is will use the PO price again.

After all postings to a PO line item, the net PPV posted will be the difference between the actual price paid and the standard cost of the material.

My company is in the early stages of moving from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA. I thought it would be interesting to give you my initial impressions of what I found out about Controlling in S/4HANA. Since we started out with ECC 6.0, we don’t have the baggage of things like classic G/L versus new G/L.

We first got access to an S/4HANA sandbox for a test drive of the system. This is an important step in the transition and has helped me get a much better understanding of how the new system works rather than reading documentation and watching training videos. What follows are my initial impressions. Hopefully, this will be useful if you are making the move, or contemplating it. 

I often get asked about difference between a Production Order and Process Order. When is it beneficial to use one over another?
As such, from controlling point of view, both objects have similar features. It is mainly on the Production Planning and Shop Floor Execution side where we see a difference. The main advantage of using Process Order is use of Process Instruction Sheet, or PI Sheet for day-to-day shop-floor activities. Whereas both the scenarios use Material Masters and Bills of Materials; Production Orders use Work Center (Machine) and Routing (sequence of operations) – Process Orders use Resource (Machine) and Recipe (sequence of operations and which component is issued during which operation). The decision on whether to go with Production Orders or Process Order would depend upon type of industry and fitment and is largely driven by the Production Planning team.

While we are on this topic of Production Orders and Process Orders, it might be beneficial to speak about other Cost Objects that are offered in Controlling.

Through my careers as cost accountant, accounting manager, project manager, and education consultant I’ve attended many SAP FICO conferences. My first experience with this particular conference was in 2014. I was impressed with the roster of speakers, the breadth of topics, and the size of the event. It is just large enough to draw a diverse cross section of SAP CO users and consultants and just small enough for you to be able to connect with others.

Where else could you chat over lunch with the legendary Janet Salmon?

If you use Material Ledger’s Actual Costing, then you would know that the Post Closing Step creates accounting documents depending on how the variances for the Material have been distributed. For example, a material with a price (or exchange rate) difference of $100 could be sold, scrapped, used in a production order that is complete, used in a production order that is not complete, transferred to another plant, or left in inventory. And this only refers to the differences that are created on the material itself (single-level), and not the differences that are transferred from other materials (multilevel) which have their own slew of Material Ledger postings.

 Because of this, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of postings that are created by the Material Ledger’s closing entry and what they mean. Some companies choose to label the General ledger accounts appropriately to indicate what the posting is for, but if you do not understand the posting, it is easy to incorrectly label the General Ledger account. Also, you may not need a separate general ledger account for each scenario as that may lead to more General Ledger accounts than you need, and may create even more confusion.

We recently upgraded a test system from S/4 1610 to S/4 1709 and one of the interesting things that we found was that SAP recommends that the switch for activating profit center accounting (PCA) should be activated. This was a surprise because I found no mention of this in the Simplification document for 1709 or in on-line searches.

Since release ECC 5.0 clients using the new general ledger with the profit center or segment scenarios active were warned against activation of classic PCA. With the new GL scenarios profit center functionality was incorporated in the GL and the old profit center ledger 8A was not activated. In this case the classic reports in the information system for PCA would not return any results if they were executed.

Dive into this list of the top FAQ's on SAP S/4HANA Finance.

 Is merging of actuals & plan into ACDOCA versus ACDOCP? Is the planning data going to go to ACDOCA or ACDOCP?  If we copy actual to plan for each monthly forecast version, will the P table end up with 12 times the records of the A table?

Planning data will update to ACDOCP. In your copy function you would have to decide at what aggregation you updated ACDOCP (1:1 or roll-up e.g. production orders to not have quite so much data in your forecast). 

Several colleagues have asked questions about integration between Materials Management (MM) and Financial Accounting (FI) module:

- How do postings from MM flow into FI?

- How do we find out what occurs behind-the-scenes?

- How do we identify which movement types are pointing to a specific GL Account?

- Is there a way by which we can change the posting to a different General Ledger (GL) Account?

- How does one create a new movement type and assign it to a specific GL Account?

Many SAP practitioners – IT and business alike – are in similar situation and do not know where to start on MM-FI data flow and reconciliation. This blog is an attempt to clarify the fundamentals of MM-FI account determination.

Configuration transaction OBYC forms the core of SAP’s integration between the MM, FI, and Controlling (CO) modules in a traditional SAP ERP system.

Several colleagues have asked me questions about the integration between Materials Management (MM) and Financial Accounting (FI) modules:

- How do postings flow from MM into FI?