Automatic Account Determination for Business Areas

If you use business areas, as a rule you store an account assignment for a cost element not by company code, but by company code and business area. You can thus ensure that each posting row is confirmed with an error message, if you forgot to make an account assignment for the business area.

This procedure has the following exceptions:

Management decisions

In some cases it is intended that an automatically generated posting row assigns costs to a single cost center and thus to only one business area, even when the automatically generated row displays differentiated business areas derived for it.

Example

You should post all exchange rate differences to a general cost center.

To do this, store the cost center for the corresponding cost element at the company code level and activate the indicator "Priority to business area".

System-related exceptions that are required

If a creditor or debitor row cannot be uniquely assigned to a company code, FI automatically generates posting rows without business areas. Therefore, automatic account assignments must be stored at the company code level. The system uses this to derive a business area for the posting row.

For discounts and exchange rate differences, you can choose from the following to make periodic postings to business areas and CO account assignment objects:

You wish to post discounts and exchange rate differences to different business areas. Only the CO account assignment object that you assigned automatically to each business area is of relevance for Controlling.

You make postings directly to the business area (that you uniquely assigned the posting to) and the assigned CO account assignment object.

You subsequently make a profit and loss adjustment by distributing all other postings to the business areas, which are assigned to the posting expenses. When you distribute, the system uses the automatic CO account assignments that you stored for each company code and business area. Here, you should only make the profit and loss adjustment of the account assignment object for the business area (see Profit and Loss Readjustment).

In this case, you can store the automatic account assignments on the controlling area level as well as the controlling area and business area level.

You wish to post discounts and exchange rate differences to different business areas and account assignment objects for which you make a non- statistical account assignment.

To do this, you only need to make an initial assignment of all postings to one cost center. You then distribute the postings from this cost center as a subsequent profit and loss adjustment to the business areas and CO account assignment objects. The business areas and account assignment objects are those which you assigned to the expense and revenue rows in the invoices.

To do this, store a default account assignment on the controlling area level, but do not store a detailed account assignment on the business area level. You need to set the "Priority to business area" indicator.

You cannot use the default account assignment, if you wish to distribute discounts and exchange rate differences on Profit-Center level as well as on business area level.

Instead, you have the following options:

Distribution of discounts and exchange rate differences on the profit center level, not the business area level, is not possible with the account assignment function offered.

However, you do have the following options:

Do not create the discount accounts as cost elements and assign them at period-end as claims and payables to the corresponding profit centers. For more information, see the R/3 Libary under "AC - Financials -> EC - Enterprise Controlling" in the "Profit Center Accounting -> Actual Postings -> Cash Discount Expenses/Income and Exchange Rate Differences" section.

Using substitution, you can define a custom account assignment that derives a cost center for the cost element per company code and profit center, where the cost center itself must be assigned to the profit center.