You can enter primary costs either directly in Financial Accounting (as for an invoice in Accounts Payable) or generate them from other applications (as for a goods movement in Materials Management) and transfer them to Financial Accounting. The business transactions generate an FI document which refers to data table ACDOCA where the data set is stored. This data set contains all relevant information and also contains a reference to the CO posting which is created in parallel for CO reporting.
- Cost and revenue postings in Management Accounting can result in subsequent real and statistical postings.
Real postings can be processed. They can be allocated or settled with other controlling objects. One (and only one) real posting takes place in Management Accounting. The posting contains the information that is transferred to Financial Accounting for reconciliation.
Statistical postings are only used for information purposes. You can make three additional statistical postings.
The account assignment object determines whether a posting is real or statistical, in other words, the account assignment is either a real or statistical object. For example, the master data of an internal order is used to determine whether the order is real or statistical. Only real postings are made for a real order, and likewise, only statistical postings are made for a statistical order. The cost center is the exception to this rule. You can make real and statistical postings for a cost center. If you want to post Management Accounting costs, you need to use the source document (for example, from the vendor invoice, or the material withdrawal document) to identify the corresponding real Management Accounting account assignment object. You can enter additional statistical objects, or the system can derive them. In this simple example, the cost center is entered in the Financial Accounting document so that the real Management Accounting posting can be made. The system transfers the profit center from the master data for the cost center, for the statistical posting. You always make statistical postings to the profit center.
Note
From the perspective of Financial Accounting, the profit center is one of many account assignments. From the perspective of Management Accounting, the profit center is a statistical account assignment object, which means that costs and revenues can only be statistically posted to a profit center and have additionally to be posted to a real account assignment object.
During posting, only one real account assignment object can be posted to.
If you specify a real order and a cost center in the posting row as described in the previous example, a posting is made for the internal order. Statistical postings are entered for the cost center and the profit center.
However, If the order is only statistical, then it is posted to as such, and the cost center receives real postings.
You can only assign one object type to each posting row. This means that you cannot post the same transaction row to more than one cost center or order, and so on.
Revenues can only be posted as real postings to a profitability segment, sales order, sales project, or to a real order that can have revenues. Revenue postings to the profit center are statistical, the same as for cost postings. Revenues can also be recorded as statistical values on cost centers.
