An investment program represents the planned or budgeted costs for the capital investments (or other projects) of an enterprise or corporate group in the form of a hierarchical structure. You can define the hierarchical structure in any form that suits your needs. It is not dependent on organizational units in the SAP R/3 System (such as, business areas, plants, and so on). You could structure the hierarchy to agree with the organizational plan of your enterprise, for example. Or you could base the structure on the size of the investment measures assigned to it.

In one investment program, you can manage all measures (orders or WBS elements), to which both of the following apply:

• They belong to one controlling area.
• Their currency and fiscal year variant are the same as the currency and fiscal year variant in the program definition.

When these conditions are met, you are also able to define investment programs that are valid in more than one company code.

Within the hierarchy of the investment program, it is possible to plan the costs for capital investments from the bottom up, and to budget from the top down. You can assign individual investment measures only to the lowest positions in the hierarchy (also called end nodes). The measures that are allowed at this time are internal orders, WBS elements, and maintenance orders.

You always have to enter a specific fiscal year as the approval year for a program. Approval year means that the program has values that were approved in this year (but not necessarily for this year only).

When approved budgets or measures are not used or carried out, for instance, because they have been put off until sometime in the future, then you have two options:

You can centrally define a program that applies across controlling areas for a corporate group. When you define such a program, all the controlling areas assigned to it have to use the same fiscal year variant and controlling area currency.