Unit Costing 

Use

Unit costing is a universal tool for planning costs and setting prices. You can use it to plan costs for various reference objects:

Some objects, such as general cost objects and production orders without quantity structure, can only be planned using unit costing. The cost estimate results are valid for the entire life of the object.

For WBS elements and internal orders, you can use unit costing in addition to other forms of planning such as cost element planning and structure planning. The cost estimate results can be valid for the entire life of the object or for a fiscal year.

You can calculate the costs for production orders, materials, and sales orders either using unit costing or product costing. Product costing is generally used in connection with the Production Planning (PP) Module, while unit costing can be used to enter manually data relevant to costing or to transfer it from non-SAP systems.

Features

Unit costing is a type of spreadsheet that, due to its integration, can use existing master data and prices in the R/3 system, such as activity prices from Cost Center Accounting. You can use the spreadsheet to create totals, subtotals, and formulas for mathematical operations.

You can use unit costing in the R/3 System as follows:

You can carry out simple cost planning without accessing information in the R/3 System. For example, you can enter variable items, create subtotals, and enter text items. For more information, see Creating Costing Items.

If you are using the Materials Management and Controlling components, you can create costing items that can access information from these areas, such as the standard price from the material master record, and the price for performing a certain activity type from activity type planning. For more information, see Master Data for Unit Costing and Creating Costing Items.

If you create a unit cost estimate for a reference object, you can use a reference for this. The reference object of the cost estimate (base planning object, material, order, and so on) determines which existing objects you can copy.

For more information, see Creating a Cost Estimate with Reference and Copying a Cost Estimate.

You have costed a product with a cost estimate with quantity structure You would like to simulate the effects on the costs of using different materials, for example. You can create a cost estimate without quantity structure and use the cost estimate with quantity structure as a reference.

You have costed the items of a sales order with product costing, and would like to simulate the effects on the costs of using different internal activities, for example.

See also:

For more information about the unit costing functions, see the following sections:

For more information about creating unit cost estimates for reference objects, see the following: