Companies often run projects to plan and coordinate work, staff employees, and track project progress and costs.
In this scenario, a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as an accounting structure is created. Planned project costs (uploaded by the project financial controller) can be captured in SAP Analytics Cloud. After releasing all or part of the project, the project is executed. Time can be recorded, and project-related purchasing can be performed. In finance, allocations or general journal entries can be done with regard to project WBS elements.
The project financial controller monitors the project costs through overview pages and detailed project reporting.
At period end, depending on the type of project, different period-end closing activities such as overhead application or settlement can be executed for a project.
Finally, the financial controller completes and closes project parts, then closes the complete project.
Applicable Process Steps
To sum up the steps you saw in that video, here are the general process steps listed:
- Project Financial Controller: Creates and releases project
- Controller: Performs direct activity allocation
- Employee: Does a time recording
- Project Procurement Controller: Perform a project based procurement
- General Ledger Accountant: Posts general journal entries
Benefits
The benefits of Controlling Finance Projects are:
- Create and maintain simple project up to highly complex hierarchical projects
- Select different project profiles
- Capture planned project costs and allocate budget
- Assign accounts of documents in financials and procurement or external applications to capture actual costs
- Monitor project-related purchase requisitions and purchase orders
- Receive live insight into project costs by comparing plan and actual costs as well as commitments
- Settle project costs to cost centers, G/L accounts, or asset accounting
Note
This process flow is covered in scope Item 1NT - Project Control for Finance.