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Businesses have leveraged Business Planning and Consolidations (BPC) for a year now and are now challenged by working with several new products at the same time, including SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) 7.4/7.5, the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) add-in, version 10.0 SP30 (frontend for standard SAP BPC), and SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office (frontend for embedded SAP BPC) and they need to decide if they need to go to BPC Embedded, Cloud or BPC S/4 HANA Standard.
Many companies operate in multiple regions and countries and need to report on their fixed assets based on various legal and valuation frameworks.
SAP S/4HANA provides the tools and processes to fulfill these parallel valuation requirements. Some of these requirements can be technically challenging to meet, such as when you need to use different fiscal year variants (FY variants) in the different valuation frameworks.
If you experience long run-times during SAP Material Ledger close, this blog is for you.
How much your products cost is essential to determining actual profitability. Yet most decisions are based on the standard cost since it is not easy to determine your actual costs.
SAP Material Ledger Actual Costing bridges this gap. It provides you the ability to capture actual costs by tracking variances at the material level.
Writing an effective S/4HANA business case is both a science and an art. As a business and digital transformation specialist, this continues to be my most important takeaway.
The science part is relatively easy to handle. SAP provides you with tools and you probably have your own that you devise and use such as metrics and KPIs which assist you determine the quantitative aspects of what you want out of S/4HANA.
Art is the more difficult aspect since no two customers are alike. You can't use a one size fits all approach. I approach each business case discussion with a minimum set of success factors or criteria. Here are a few of the key components:
SAP GR/IR performs a three-way match between:
You use the GRIR clearing account to record the offset of the GR and IR.
When fully processed, the postings are displayed in the clearing account balance.
Clearing is performed at the PO line item level based on the quantity entered.
You write off small differences with Transaction MR11 or via menu path:
Logistics • Materials Management • Logistics Invoice Verification • GR/IR Account Maintenance • Maintain GR/IR Clearing Account
Before maintaining the GR/IR clearing account, you should establish that no more GRs or IRs are expected for the PO item. If the invoiced quantity is more than the delivered quantity, the system expects another GR. If the invoiced quantity is less than the received quantity, the system expects another invoice.
If the GR/IR clearing account differences are not cleared by a further GR or credit memo or an invoice or return delivery, you must maintain the GR/IR clearing account manually.
The price variance and exchange rate variance are calculated.
My company is in the early stages of moving from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA.
I thought it would be interesting to give you my initial impressions of what I found out about Controlling in SAP S/4HANA. Since we started out with ECC 6.0, we didn't have to worry about things like classic G/L versus new G/L.
When we first got access to an S/4HANA sandbox for a test drive, this helped me get a much better understanding of how the new system works rather than reading documentation and watching training videos. Here are my initial impressions, which may be useful if you are making the move, or considering it.
I often get asked about the difference between a Production Order and a Process Order. When is it beneficial to use one over another?
From a 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.
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.