Creating Cover Groups

Use

To use BCS cover eligibility, you need to create cover groups.

BCS cover groups bundle budget addresses so that they have a common budget and common budget consumption values (or common revenues for the purpose of Revenues Increasing the Budget, when you deal with revenue cover groups). This makes it possible for different areas of a public organization to share budget, budget consumption, and revenues with each other.

Budget addresses of a cover group are defined according to whether they are entitled to receive budget from other budget addresses, send budget to other budget addresses, or both. When you create cover groups in your organization, you can choose to automatically create the cover group numbers from the internal number range interval 01; or to assign an explicit cover group name using external number range intervals which you define in Customizing.

Prerequisites

To create cover groups, BCS cover eligibility must have been activated for your FM area and fiscal year. See Cover Eligibility for further information.

The following additional Customizing steps are required, before you can start to create cover eligibility rules:

  1. Go to the Implementation Guide for Start of the navigation path Public Sector Management: Funds Management Government Next navigation step Budget Control System Next navigation step BCS Budgeting Next navigation step Control Budgeting Flow Next navigation step Cover Eligibility Next navigation step MaintainNumberRangefor Cover Groups End of the navigation path . Set up at least one number range interval for the cover group numbers to be assigned during the creation of cover eligibility rules.If you want to automatically create cover group numbers, then you must define the internal number range interval 01.

  2. If you want to generate cover groups, you must define a derivation strategy for this in Customizing. Via the derivation strategy, you specify how budget addresses are to be assigned to cover groups. The generation of cover groups takes the new cover group numbers from the number range intervals you defined previously. If you specify the name of the cover group to be created, this name or number must be included in an appropriate external number range interval.

Automatic and Manual Cover Groups

Cover groups generated automatically via the derivation strategy for generating cover groups may be automatic or manual . For automatic cover groups, this means that AVC automatically shares consumable budget from different members of the automatic cover group. This then covers budget consumption from any member of the same cover group. For more details on AVC for automatic cover groups, see Availability Control for Automatic Cover Groups .

You can also generate manual cover groups using the derivation strategy for generating cover groups.

In addition, you can define individual cover groups or CE rules using transaction Process Single CE Rule (FMCERULE), in which you must choose whether you want to create an automatic or manual cover group or CE rule. When you specify that the cover group is to be manual , then the budget addresses assigned to the manual cover group will share their budget values for manual transfers in the Budgeting Workbench. This is done by using the budgeting process Transfer CE .

Revenue Cover Groups

You can also create revenue cover groups. A revenue cover group must have a single specified member to which you have assigned the role ‘RIB source address’. This address is then the source address for all related budget documents increasing the budget with budgeting process Revenues Increasing the Budget.

For further information on mass generation of revenue cover groups (using transaction FMCEGENCG) see Generating Cover Eligibility Rules and for further details on the use of revenue cover groups for Revenues Increasing the Budget, see the chapters on Revenues Increasing the Budget .

Process Single Cover Groups/Generation of Cover Groups

You can create single cover groups (manual or automatic CE rules or revenue cover groups) using transaction FMCERULE. This transaction also enables you to display or change existing cover groups.

In contrast to this, you can also automatically generate cover groups for budgeting in your organization via transaction FMCEGENCG. The prerequisite for this is that Customizing has been correctly set up for the derivation strategy for generating cover groups. After the generation, you can then maintain individual exceptions to the derivation strategy in the form of new or modified cover groups using transaction FMCERULE.

Assigning RIB Rules with Call Procedure to Automatic Cover Groups

You can assign RIB rules with call procedure to automatic cover groups using transaction FMCERULE. RIB rules with call procedure are a special kind of contributor to automatic cover groups (pseudo-cover eligibility), allowing availability control to automatically use additional revenues or transferable amounts from those RIB rules to cover the over-consumption of receiving expenditure budget addresses of automatic cover groups.

You can subsequently post budget documents with process ‘Revenues Increasing the Budget’ to increase the budget of receiving budget addresses in the automatic cover group using the contributing RIB rules with call procedure. You can do this in the Budgeting Workbench (manually), or by using the new process for balancing automatic cover groups .

You must have activated RIB call procedure in Customizing activity Activate Cover Eligibility , under Public Sector Management -> Funds Management Government -> Budget Control System (BCS) -> Budgeting -> Control Budgeting Flow -> Cover Eligibility.

You must have also made the appropriate settings for Revenues Increasing the Budget under Public Sector Management -> Funds Management Government -> Budget Control System (BCS) -> Budgeting -> Control Budgeting Flow .