Budget Categories 

Use

Under certain conditions, you may want to manage several parallel budgets for one capital investment program. The most common instance is managing separate budgets for costs to be capitalized and incidental costs that are not capitalized.

Prerequisites

You define your budget categories per program type in Customizing for Investment Management (choose Investment Programs ® Budgeting in Program ® Budget Categories). SAP provides the standard budget categories:1 (costs to be capitalized) and 2 (incidental costs not eligible for capitalization).

You specify in the definition of the investment program if you want separation according to budget categories.

You assign a usage indicator to the budget categories. This indicator permits the system to separate the actual values that come due according to budget categories.

Features

When you have stipulated the use of budget categories in the definition of the investment program, you have to enter the values separately for the budget categories when you budget the program. In the same way, you also have to enter plan values by budget category.

Budget Categories and Measures

You cannot enter values separately according to budget category at the level of the individual measure. On the individual measure, you enter plan and budget values without special categories, as usual.

However, it is still possible to establish the proportion of plan and budget values from an individual measure that can be attributed to defined budget categories (comparison in reporting). To do this, you can specify corresponding percentage rates per budget category. This is done when assigning the individual measure to the investment program position. The plan and budget values of the individual measure are then weighted with these percentage rates, and can be assigned to the appropriate budget categories.

Budget Categories

When you use budget categories, you have to budget the measures yourself directly. Budget distribution is not possible from the positions higher in the hierarchy (refer to Distributing the Budget from the Program Position to the Measures). Availability control is therefore only possible using reports in the Information System.

Standard Assignment of Actual Values to Budget Categories

For actual values, the system can separate

You assign actual values to budget categories by maintaining the usage indicator for the budget category (see above). However, this separation of the actual values is only possible once the periodic settlement has been carried out (refer to Settlement of Investment Measures).

Be careful if the capitalization keys of an investment measure specify that less should be capitalized in the book depreciation area than in the cost accounting depreciation area. (That is, a certain percentage of the amount to be settled is settled to nonoperating expense, rather than to assets - refer to Periodic Settlement to an Asset under Construction ). If this is the case, the settlement amount is nonetheless calculated with the total percentage of the cost depreciation area (at the moment always 100%) of budget category 1 (= costs to be capitalized).

User-Defined Assignment of Actual Values to Budget Categories

There is another option in addition to the standard assignment of the actual values to budget categories 1 and 2. You can use user exit AAIP0001 to create your own assignments to budget categories you have defined yourself (for example, by cost elements or cost element groups).

For more detailed information, see the R/3 online documentation for customer exit AAIP0001 (in transaction CMOD under Help).

Information System

The individual budget categories are displayed separately at the level of the investment program, as well as at the level of the individual measure, in the Information System.

Standard drilldowns report on budget categories 1 and 2 that are provided by SAP. If you work with your own user-defined budget categories, then you have to enter them in the form so that the system can select the data records.

Example

The following graphic shows how the different budget categories are displayed in reporting:

The investment program has a capital budget of 1900, and a budget for costs that are not capitalized of 600. At the level of the assigned investment measure, it was specified that the budget for the measure (2000) should be made up of 80% capital budget and 20% costs budget. Of the posted actual debits of 900, 600 are settled to an asset and 300 are settled to a cost center.