Actual Postings 

Purpose

All the postings in Financial Accounting, Materials Management, Asset Management and Sales and Distribution and Controlling which affect profits are reflected in Profit Center Accounting.

 

The profit center is not an independent account assignment object in the SAP system. Instead, the data is posted to other objects and passed on from there to a profit center in Profit center Accounting in accordance with the assignment set in Customizing. This makes it possible to display your company’s results by profit center based on the original postings and with no additional work.

The system only deviates from this basic rule if – in addition to data that is relevant for profit – you want to transfer other assigned balance sheet account items or P&L statement items manually.

Features

From a profit center point of view, internal goods movements often represent transfers between profit centers. Consequently, Profit Center Accounting creates additional lines (e.g. “internal revenues”) in addition to the original FI postings. These additional lines are necessary for you to be able to represent all the activities performed by your profit centers.

You can valuate goods movements between profit centers using either external prices, group costs of goods manufactured, or special transfer prices. Using multiple valuation approaches in your system, you can reflect the desired valuation method in Controlling and Financial Accounting as well as in Profit Center Accounting. For general information about transfer prices, see Multiple Valuation Approaches/Transfer Prices. For detailed information on transfer prices in Profit Center Accounting and on the posting logic, see Transfer Prices in Profit Center Accounting.

If you are not using transfer prices from a profit center viewpoint or a group viewpoint, the system valuates your postings to Profit Center Accounting using the legal prices (external prices).

The sections found under Actual Data Transfer contain examples of how Profit Center Accounting receives data from the other components of the SAP System (see Data Origins). The examples profit center postings that are valuated from the legal view. For examples of valuation using transfer prices, see Posting Logic and Account Determination.

You can complement your profit center data by transferring selected balance sheet line items to profit centers. This makes it possible to evaluate additional key figures, such as return on investment and cash flow. For more information, see Balance Sheet Items in Profit Center Accounting.

In Preparation for Consolidation, you can determine partner relationships which are needed for elimination of internal business and preliminary results in profit center consolidation.

The system stores the following currencies in Profit Center Accounting:

·         Company code currency

·         Any one Profit Center Accounting currency for each controlling area

·         The currency in which the business transaction was processed (transaction currency)

The data is stored according to the following key fields:

·         Company code

·         Profit center

Partner profit center, for elimination purposes or to evaluate sender and receiver profit centers

·         Account originally posted, or a separate account in case of an additional manual account assignment

·         Origin object type, in order to recognize the type of object to which the data in Profit Center Accounting was originally posted (such as cost center, order, project or sales order)

·         Functional area, to represent expenditures according to function (sales, administration, research and development, and so on) using the cost‑of‑sales method

·         partner company, to divide sales by affiliated company

·         origin group, as a subdivision of material postings (If material consumption of two materials is posted under the same account, you can differentiate the postings if an origin group was assigned to the materials in the master record.)

·         the business transaction (Financial Accounting posting, material consumption, goods received for order, and so on)

Technically, the data in Profit Center Accounting is stored in ledger 8A of the component FI ‑ Special Purpose Ledgers.