You now have a better understanding of what added value event-based production accounting in SAP S/4HANA brings. Cost postings are linked to business events, providing real-time insights and drastically simplifying period-end closing.
It is applicable to production accounting as well. Since we are moving to real-time WIP and variances, we need to consider error handling closely. Therefore, you have apps offering monitoring and handling errors during the period. These features are available for the orders with exceptions, such as Production Orders/Process Orders or Product Cost Collectors. In this course we will focus on production and process orders only. You need to ensure that costs are captured correctly in cost objects, perform cost analysis, track variances to hold down costs, and, identify anomalies to ensure the cost of goods manufactured can be used to capitalize the inventories in the balance sheet.
If some errors appear, this can primarily be due to two reasons, such as the following:
- Errors in event-based postings for order exceptions, for example, in work-in-process (WIP) calculation or variance postings.
- Transactions, including journal entry postings, allocations, and settlements from other objects, which trigger postings not managed in an event-based manner.
Sequence
In a few words, you can do the following:
- View event-based posting exceptions for selected orders
- Simulate resolving exceptions and check results
- Trigger event-based postings to solve exceptions
Let's explore further:
Identify errors
First, you can check the event-based production cost postings and discover whether some problems are to be solved. For this, you can use the following apps:
- Production Cost Overview - Event-Based app that gives insight into current trends, and helps you identify and analyze priority issues by yourself.
- Order Exception Monitor: An event-based app that gives you an overview of the latest problems per type. You run this app to review and reprocess objects by ledger, once you fix the root cause of the error. The event-based WIP report analysis comes up with the selected orders. It shows all the orders with event-based posting errors which you can then reprocess. This report includes errors with event-based overhead, WIP, and variance. It provides an overview of errors to reprocess and orders to post. You can then navigate from one of its cards to more detailed apps (detailed later).
- Manage Product Costing Errors: An app that enables you to list event-based posting errors, identify source transaction details, simulate the impact of corrections performed, and manually delete errors.
When the errors are identified, post-process
Overheads errors
Using the Postprocess Event-Based Postings—Overhead Calculation app, you can run the report to resolve the event-based overhead errors. You could detect errors due to goods movement, confirmation, data out of validity in the overhead costing sheet, or blocked postings. Then, you can reprocess your correction(s), choosing Post.
Errors in product costing
Using the Postprocess Event-Based Postings - Product Costing app, you can check and resolve event-based posting exceptions in production orders (also in process orders and Product Cost Collectors) with settlement type Settled Based on Business Events (event-based processing key RSEBW and PCCEB) for a specified company code and posting date.
You can run the report to review and inspect if there is any error or manual additional posting for the event-based WIP, variance, and unsettled costs to receivers. This step is executed in the same manner for partially delivered production orders and for (totally) delivered production orders. From there, you can run jobs for unsettled orders to valuate WIP or variances or reevaluate already settled orders for adjustments in the calculation.
Check again after the post-process
After this last step, you can check again to ensure that there are no more errors and that all calculations have been performed. The errors have disappeared in the Order Exception Monitor app.