Defining Default Account Assignments

Meet Chris, an experienced management accounting employee at Bike Company SE. He's skilled at using SAP S/4HANA, having extensive knowledge of his department's processes and a comprehensive understanding of the company's operations. Apart from maintaining crucial applications that streamline work for others, Chris also acts as an administrator and business process configuration expert. He is the contact person for establishing and managing Overhead Cost Accounting processes within the company.

Chris loves discovering and utilizing new features and helping other users. Recently, Sarah, a colleague from the financial accounting department, sought his expertise for support and assistance. This is what they talked about:

Let’s now take a closer look at the tools that help streamline accounting data.

You'll learn how to define default values for cost assignment. In the next lessons, you will also delve into more sophisticated features like validation and substitution rules that can identify inconsistencies in account assignment objects and ensure precise postings.

We'll start with an in-depth exploration of the default account assignment.

The default account assignment is a tool that automatically proposes specific cost assignment objects, such as cost centers or profit centers during journal entry. You can determine which management accounting object is defaulted for each line item based on the combination of primary cost and revenue G/L account and company code.

As an example, consider recurring utility expenses, which should be charged to the Utilities cost center. For this purpose, a default account assignment can be established as shown in the figure below.

First, the cost element for Utilities for the relevant Company Code is connected to the respective cost center in the default account assignment configuration.

Now whenever you enter a utility expense in Financial Accounting, the system automatically proposes the Utilities cost center. You still have the option to manually overwrite the cost center if necessary.

This leads to a more efficient accounting workflow, as the account assignment object is entered automatically during the posting process, minimizing the need for manual input.

Default account assignments are especially useful when line items are automatically posted, such as when posting exchange rate differences and discounts in Financial Accounting, or price differences in Material Management.

In addition to cost centers, you can also indicate profit centers or profitability segments for allocating costs and revenues to.

In summary, the default account assignment establishes a default value for the controlling objects when posting costs or revenues, ensuring that these are automatically charged to the right entities.

To configure a default account assignment, you perform the following steps:

1. For each cost assignment, enter the company code and the cost element that should be included in the account assignment.
2. Enter the corresponding account assignment object (cost center or profit center). If you want the system to determine a profitability segment instead, you can use the PrfSeg checkbox. This is used when transferring data, such as price differences, to Margin Analysis.
3. You have the option to specify detailed account assignments, which can be differentiated by valuation area or profit center. To do this, enter the following values in the "Acct assignmt detail" column: 1 for valuation area or 3 for profit center. Then select the corresponding entry in the Dialog structure on the left and enter the relevant cost assignment.

The default account assignment feature suggests default values for specific accounts, improving the accuracy of financial data and streamlining the process through automatic assignment. This reduces the likelihood of errors in manual data entry and saves a considerable amount of time that would otherwise be spent repeatedly assigning these costs.