You have heard about the concepts of project and WBS element. You now want to know more about their differences and how to use them.
The following video will help you understand and distinguish between the concepts better:
More specifically, if in overhead controlling you only intend to monitor their progress and financial performance, you may reduce this structure to a single WBS element. By default, when creating an overhead project, there is a single WBS element created as well (same codification).
When posting entries (G/L entries or any other), the WBS element is one of the possible cost assignments.
You now know that WBS elements represent discrete parts of the work linked to a project. They are used as cost objects each time you need to gather costs and revenues from a specific task related to a project.
When costs and revenues relating to a specific topic need to be followed up with a more horizontal approach, you now know that you will use projects.
Often it makes sense to break the project into tasks and to set up a hierarchy for them: In SAP S/4HANA, a work breakdown structure (WBS) is then created, consisting of WBS elements for each sub-part of the project.