Outlining Cost Center Accounting Processes

You have been hired by the Bike Company as a controller. One of your tasks is to support overhead cost controlling functions in the management accounting department. The Bike Company recently implemented SAP S/4HANA and everyone is adjusting to using the new system. But what is overhead cost controlling? What are the common tasks you will be performing and how do you use SAP S/4HANA to perform them?

First, have a look at some of the main elements you need to know:

In this lesson, we will introduce the key processes we will go through in this course. Each video below illustrates common business scenarios and how they are mapped to SAP S/4HANA terminology.

The example above shows the need for cost center master data management, where you create new cost centers and assign them to the cost center standard hierarchy.

In the video, we show direct postings using primary cost accounts, as well as the ability to reassign costs directly in overhead cost controlling.

In this example, we use auxiliary cost centers to collect overhead costs that can't be attributed directly to departments at the time of entry. We then use allocation cycles to spread the costs to the actual departments. We use plan or actual quantities posted on statistical key figures to split the costs fairly.

Here, we use activity types so that cost centers that provide services to other departments can charge these services in a transparent way. We maintain a cost rate for the per unit cost of these services. Finally, we post direct activity allocations to debit the receiver cost centers for the service quantities provided using secondary cost accounts.

Finally, we introduce cost planning per cost account for cost centers and the requirement to use the embedded analytics in SAP S/4HANA to keep track of performance and check for variances.