Describing the value flows in overhead cost accounting

For postings with cost accounts (to G/L accounts with account type "primary costs" or "secondary costs") the costs or revenues respectively must be assigned to one and only one real CO object. However, statistical postings may be assigned to one or several additional objects.

A real account assignment allows you to further allocate the value to other objects and in the end affects the profit in CO-PA; if the assignment does not affect the profit in CO-PA, the assignment is statistical.

To distinguish between real and statistical types of postings, the parameter Value Type is used, as an example, value type 4 defines real actual postings, whereas value type 11 stands for statistical actual postings. For further purposes, there are more than 100 different value types used in SAP S/4HANA, such as value type 22 that defines commitment.

For example, during an invoice entry for company car expenses, the costs for company cars are assigned to the cost center Car Fleet with value type 4 (real actual posting). In addition, the costs need to be evaluated for each single company car. Therefore one statistical WBS element exists for each company car and this will be debited with value type 11 (statistical actual posting).

As a result, the total costs for the car fleet can be evaluated on the cost center and each single car can be controlled on its WBS element. Only postings to the cost center have an effect on the overall result for the P&L and margin analysis reporting.

A profit center is the only object type which is always statistical. As described above, profit center accounting is statistical management accounting. On the other hand, object types that cannot be created as statistical objects are the logistics cost objects, namely the production order and the sales order item.

Note

There are other logistics cost objects, for example, maintenance order or quality management order which are not discussed in this training.

The posting to accounting resulting from a logistical process is always real, meaning it affects the overall result. Such postings can additionally be assigned to a statistical CO object. For example, the profit center in a production order is posted statistically, whereas the production order itself received the real actual values.