Outlining the Concept of Allocations

In SAP Analytics Cloud, you can create complex multistep allocations with ease. You can:

• Define the specific source and target dimensions for each step
• Define the specific source elements, allocation driver, and target elements for each step
• Execute allocations against a selected dimension members from within a story
• Schedule allocations in the calendar

For example, Corporate HR is an overhead function. What logic will we use to push these costs back to the divisions?

You have finished your labor and expense forecast. In this video, we will show you how you can use allocations to burden the cost centers who receive the services.

Allocations are used to assign overhead costs to operating units so that they know their full cost of operations. For example, you want to allocate:

• the cost of HR to departments based on the number of employees,
• annual values to period values based on historical trends, or
• overhead, based on the relative amount of manufacturing cost.

To do this, you can create data actions with multiple allocation steps. As you add allocation steps to the data action, you can easily visualize the entire allocation process. You can then execute the allocation data action in a story and see the impact in the data table.