Period Closing Activities for Material Stocks 

Purpose

You transfer material stocks to Profit Center Accounting in the course of closing operations in Materials Management.

You can transfer material stocks as often as you wish, since the system deletes previously transferred data before each new transfer.

Should you have already transferred the balance online in the same month, please note that the stock postings made here will also be deleted.

If you would like to transfer asset balances online, generate the opening balance in Profit Center Accounting. When doing this, perform the period-closing activities once, prior to selecting online transfer.

Prerequisites

To transfer material stocks to Profit Center Accounting, you must be using the component Materials Management (MM).

The period in Materials Management should have ended.

Process Flow

You can call up the function for transferring material stocks in Profit Center Accounting Customizing, under Actual Postings ® Transfer Selected Balance Sheet Items ® Set Up Material Stocks.

The selection screen provides you with the choice of all company codes within the active controlling area. Select the period to be transferred. The current period is always based on the status of Materials Management. Normally, the data from the previous period is transferred.

On 3rd June 1997, the period closing program in Materials Management has already run. The current period in MM is 06/1997. To transfer data for May, choose the previous period.

You should run the program in the background, as large amounts of data are normally selected. If you check off the option Line items, the system writes a document in Profit Center Accounting for each material number. Due to the large volume of data generally processed when operating this option, you should only use it for test purposes.

The material stocks are posted in Profit Center Accounting under the same reconciliation account as in Financial Accounting. The system does not create any FI documents when the transfer is made.

The system assigns material stocks by taking the assignment in the material master record, in the plant segment (see Assigning Materials).

In some cases it is not possible to assign raw materials to one profit center. In this case, they can be assigned to individual profit centers by means of distribution (see Assessment and Distribution).

Result

The asset balances from the period in question are transferred to Profit Center Accounting. They are assigned to profit centers via assignments made in the component Materials Management (MM).

The program prints an error log. You can display the transferred data in the information system (see Standard Report Painter Reports in Profit Center Accounting). Provided that line items are available, these can be analyzed with the corresponding line item report.

First, the program updates the final balance of materials. It also determines the final balance of the previous period and updates this with a minus ("-") sign. As a result, the summary records for each period contain the movements in material stocks, as is customary in financial accounting. This indirect method has the advantage that you do not need to carry the balance forward in Profit Center Accounting at the end of the year. The total balance of material stocks is posted to the period 01 if there is no balance in period 0.