Configuring Budgeting Functions

When a project is executed, the available funds are committed to various places. You create commitments by assigning purchasing documents. You post actual costs to the project. Together with the costs of apportioned orders, both of these forms of fund commitments result in what is referred to as assigned funds.

The funds overview can be regarded as passive availability control. However, the Project System also supports active availability control. The corresponding assigned funds are calculated and checked against the budget. You can find the assigned funds in the budget-bearing WBS element and in the lower-level assignable WBS elements. If certain tolerance limits are violated (shortfall in budget or budget exceeded), this can trigger various system responses (a warning, for example, or an error message). In Customizing for tolerance limits, you can specify which response is to be triggered and when.

Once activated, availability control is run for each subsequent posting in the project. The availability control performs the following tasks:

• Determines the budget-bearing WBS elements (called controlling elements)

• Determines the corresponding assigned funds

• Checks the assigned funds against the budgets of the controlling elements.

  You can find the assigned funds in the budget-bearing WBS element itself and in the lower-level assignable WBS elements (account assignment elements).

You can use the budget profile to configure the following:

• Whether funds are assigned in overall values or annual values

• The time horizon (number of years in the past and future and start value); these settings are only useful for budgeting annual values

• Representation (for example, in thousands)

• The budgeting currency (controlling area currency, object currency, or transaction currency)

• Currency translation (exchange rate type, value date, translation of remaining value)

• Availability control (check against current budget or release, overall values or annual values, currency, activation type, and use for budgeting activation)

Availability control can promptly identify commitments for a project that are too high and trigger various actions in response.

You can activate availability control for each budget profile. You can enter one or more tolerance limits for a budget profile in a controlling area for each activity group.

If a tolerance limit is reached, the SAP system triggers selected actions, such as warnings, warnings with mails sent to the person responsible for the project, or error messages.