Business Rules Management

Business rules are parameter-driven functions within SAP Business Planning and Consolidation models for calculating and posting monetary amounts in support of common accounting activities, such as intercompany booking, currency translation, and eliminations and adjustments.

To manage business rules in SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, select Start of the navigation pathPlanning and Consolidation Administration Next navigation step Rules Next navigation step Business RulesEnd of the navigation path.
Features

Adding Business Rules to Models

When you create or modify a model, you can add business rules to it. You can add the following types of business rules:

  • Account-based calculation

  • Currency translation

  • Intercompany booking

  • Carry-forward processing to initialize beginning balances when a new fiscal cycle starts

  • US Eliminations

  • Eliminations and adjustments when generating consolidation entries for a group of entities, such as eliminations, adjustments, reclassifications, and minority calculations

After adding a business rule type to a model, you must customize it to meet your needs by specifying parameter values. For example, in Eliminations and Adjustments, you can indicate which balances to read before calculating an amount, or under which account and audit member to post the calculated amount. In addition to customizing default business rules, delivered with the IFRS starter kit for instance, you can define new rules for various types of business processes and add them to a model.

Editing Business Rules

You can edit the list of available rules for a selected type of business rule within a model. You can then edit a specific rule in the list. You can use standard Microsoft Excel functionality to perform the following actions:

  • Select multiple detail record rows

  • Copy, paste, and delete detail records by row

  • Copy and paste within a cell by right-clicking and selecting a context menu option or using CTRL + C and CTRL + V

  • Copy rows

You can look up members within the cells of a rule by clicking the Lookup icon that appears when you place the cursor within that cell.

Validating Business Rules

You can verify the detail records of a business rule after modifying it by clicking Validate in the <Rule Name> page. A message appears displaying a successful status or any errors encountered.

Note
Currently you can choose text nodes and external nodes as source members of the dimension types account (A), category (C), audit (D), and flow (S), but not as destination members unless the source and destination dimensions share exactly the same hierarchy.
Activities

In SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, all business rules need to be run through Consolidation Monitor. To do this, you need to first define a task sequence after setting up all the business rules and then trigger these tasks from Consolidation Monitor.