Costing

As part of Logistics, Plant Maintenance is integrated with various areas in Accounting. To ensure effective controlling of plant maintenance orders, you need to set up the organizational units in Financial Accounting and Controlling correctly, and create cost centers specific to plant maintenance with the relevant annual plan.

The functionality of Operation Account Assignment permits a single plant maintenance or customer service order to have cost objects at the operation level. Each of the account assignment functions available for the header is possible at the operation level, delivering more flexibility in task costing.

There has always been a need to cost out individual tasks during maintenance while keeping the aggregated total for the entire job, especially in service industries.

There is also a need from external bodies (regulators, legal requirements) to capture costs on a detailed level and report them in categories that are not part of the company’s overall business strategy.

The Operation Account Assignment (OAA) solution allows for a single order with cost objects at the operation level. Each of the processes available for the header is available at the operation.

An order must be header based or operation-based costing. There is no ability to have mixed-mode costing.

The OAA enhancement touches many parts of the SAP EAM work processes. System status ACAS (Activity Account Assignment) is displayed when the order operation is the account assignment object.

The operation account assignment and cost data can be found in a separate view within the operation details.

OAA order costs are only stored for the operation objects. Header totals are dynamically summed as required. No costs are stored on the database for the OAA order object. To use this enhancement to must activate business function LOG_EAM_OLC.

For OAA orders, manual entry of estimated costs is only at the operation level, with the header displaying the sum of the operations.

For ease of use, the estimated costs may be copied from the planned costs at any point until order release using the Copy Estimated Cost button.

The copy function also works with regular header costed orders. After copy, status SKKP is set and manual input of estimated values is no longer possible. This copied version may, for example, be utilized to freeze the planned costs at time of order release.

Purchase requisitions created from OAA orders will have the originating operation as the default account assignment object for the item.

The operation account assignment from the purchase requisition is automatically transferred to the purchase order.

Material reservations for an OAA order default the originating operation as the account assignment object.

Unplanned goods movements may have manual operation account assignment.

The goods receipt for a purchase order maintains the originating operation as the account assignment object.

Settlement rules cannot be maintained at the header level for OAA orders. Overhead and settlement processing for OAA orders is performed at the individual operation level.

The invoice entry for a purchase order will retain the original operation account assignment from the purchase order.

An overhead rate is a flat-rate percentage or amount-based markup on direct costs that enables you to allocate overhead costs to cost accounting objects according to cause. An example of the use of overhead rates is to allocate overhead from material cost centers to orders by debiting the orders in proportion to the material withdrawals and crediting the material cost centers with the same amounts.

Overhead rates are also used to allocate sales and administration overhead. These overheads can also be used to monetize resources consumed in the order that are not listed separately, such as administration, transportation, and the like. Such overheads generate additional planned costs if they refer to planned resources. If they affect consumed resources, they represent additional actual costs and are listed as such in the order.

Commitments are contractual or MRP-relevant obligations that are not entered in accounting but that lead to actual costs as a result of various business transactions.

Commitments management is used to enter these obligations at an early stage and to analyze their effects on costing and finance, for example, for purchase orders.

Order commitments are used to separately update and monitor certain resources, in particular resources that are required for external procurement. Commitment values are updated in parallel with order planning and execution; that is to say, both the standard cost estimate and actual costing influence the commitment data.

You must activate open items management in Customizing for the order type in question.

On the SAP Menu screen, choose

Tools → Customizing → IMG → Execute Project → Goto → SAP Reference IMG

The following tables provide menu paths for Order Costing Customizing settings.