Performing Procedures for Period-End Costing

You are responsible for ensuring that your projects are fully allocated the appropriate period-end cost allocations. You also need to prepare various financial analysis for your project. To complete these activities, you need to evaluate the period-end processes that must occur for the customer project.

Period-end closing is a framework that you use to perform period-related commercial transactions. You also use it to ensure that all the data belonging to a period is determined and available for purposes of enterprise control.

Period-end closing procedures are performed in the background, usually once per period. You usually perform procedures for the previous month at the beginning of the month.

As of SAP R/3 4.6, you can use the Schedule Manager to help perform period-end closing.

The Schedule Manager supports workflows for FI, CO, PS, and so on.

You can determine the actual prices for activity types and business processes at the end of the period. The actual prices are the actual costs divided by the quantities consumed.

You control if revaluation at actual prices is possible in the Customizing parameters for the actual versions that depend on the fiscal year. You also specify if revaluation at actual prices takes place separately for each activity type.

You calculate actual prices in Overhead Cost Controlling.

You perform revaluation at actual prices in the period-end closing process for the project. You charge cost objects with the difference between the actual price and the price originally allocated during activity allocation.

You can revaluate activities and business processes at actual prices in the following components:

• Project System (projects, WBS elements, networks, and network operations).

• Cost Object Controlling for all cost objects (product cost collectors, production orders and process orders if they are being used as cost objects, sales order items, internal orders, cost object hierarchies, and general cost objects).

You calculate actual overheads based on the costing sheet and overhead key you entered on the WBS element, network header, or network activity.

Actual overhead calculation allocates cost objects with actual overheads. Overhead is allocated to cost objects using quantity-based or percentage allocation rates.

You can simulate overhead allocation (test run).

The overhead calculation process generates the following postings:

• Overhead expenses are charged to cost objects (network activities, network header, and WBS elements).

• The cost center (or the overhead order or process) is credited.

Costs are updated using the secondary cost elements specified in the credit rows in the costing sheet. Actual overhead calculation uses the costing sheet entered in the cost object.

The first three jobs in month end are used to allocate costs to the project structure. You can choose to use one or all three of these allocation methods.

For actual template allocation, the only difference between actual and planning is that you can use a different quantity formula to determine the actual quantity of the process that you want to allocate. In addition, this posting credits the process (which is a cost object) and debits the project element.

For example, you determine the number of externally processed or service activities plus the number of directly procured components in the network. You multiply the resulting total by the price for one purchasing transaction (vendor selection, purchase order entry, purchase order monitoring, and so on).

The process template consists of four principal columns:

• Object (for example, process)

• Quantity (planned and actual)

• Activation (planned and actual)

• Actual time of allocation

The object describes a process or group of processes.

You can determine the planned and actual process quantities using various methods.

You can use master data to calculate planned quantities, and in most cases, you can use the actual consumption figures in the Logistics Information System (LIS) to arrive at actual process costs.

Activation determines whether a process is relevant for a particular cost object.

The allocation time determines when a process quantity can be assigned to a cost object.

You calculate process costs based on the template selected for the project. You create templates in Customizing.

Actual Template Allocation

You determine the template by the controlling area, costing sheet, overhead key, and template environment for the function.

Use template environment 004 for networks; use template 005 for WBS elements.

Define the costing sheet and overhead key values in the Control or Assignments tabs of the WBS elements, network header, or network activities.

After you select a template, the calculation program determines the following:

• Each process in the template that applies to the project.

• How much the project consumes of each process (in the template that applies to the project).

• If you need to add the calculated value to the project cost at the start, end, or continuously throughout the project.