The costing variant contains the control parameters for the cost estimate.
For CO production orders (production orders without quantity structure) you must define a costing variant for the calculation of planned costs. In contrast to PP and PP-PI production orders, you do not need a costing variant to valuate the actual activity types and allocated business processes. In production orders without quantity structure, they are valuated with the planned activity price of the period.
The costing variant for the production order without quantity structure contains all control parameters for the preliminary cost estimate - for the calculation of planned costs.
A costing variant contains the following parameters amoung others:
The costing variant is defaulted through the planning profile. In turn, the planning profile is defaulted through the order type.
The standard system contains the predefined costing variant "PC01 / CO production order". This costing variant specifies costing type "09 Unit Costing - CO Production Order" and valuation variant "006 / Production Order - Planned".
Although it is technically possible to have two costing variants with the same costing type and valuation variant, this should be avoided to prevent data from being overwritten.
The reason for this is that the key structure for the costing results in the database uses the costing type and the valuation variant, rather than the costing variant.
You should assign a different valuation variant to each costing variant with which you intend to save cost estimates.
This one-to-one assignment enables you to change the valuation strategies later as required.
The planned costs for the production order without quantity structure are calculated through unit costing. You can either enter the necessary data manually or take it from a preceding system. The pricing date is set by default to the current date. The material prices and activity prices for the activity types and business processes are determined at this point.