The plan values of the appropriation request form the basis for decision about approving it as an investment. The planned costs for appropriation requests are available for your investment planning for your entire enterprise. The planned costs assist you in the preinvestment analysis that is part of the approval process. In addition, the plan values are the basis for creating an investment program for an enterprise or an enterprise area.

You can define planning profiles for controlling the planning of costs and revenue for appropriation requests (in Customizing for Investment Management: Planning). These profiles control

• The allowed timeframe for planning annual values
• The representation of the plan values in the planning or budgeting transaction

You can assign a planning profile for cost planning and a planning profile for revenue planning to each appropriation request type. In this way, you can control planning differently for each appropriation request type.

You can plan costs and revenues for appropriation requests. There are several different transactions for planning:

• Master data of the appropriation request (planning and cost estimate)
• Overview planning (simultaneous cost planning for a number of variants)

Planning costs of an appropriation request takes place using structure planning (only annual or overall costs, not cost element planning). You do not plan on the appropriation request itself, but on its variants. You can manage separate plan values for each appropriation request variant.

Often you already know when planning the appropriation request how much of the planned costs will be capitalized, and how much should be treated as expense (overhead). Therefore, the system lets you plan costs to be capitalized (investment costs) separately. In the drilldown reports for appropriation requests, you can report on investment costs separately.

The system calculates the combined costs as the sum of investment costs and overhead. The system determines cash flow as the difference between combined costs and revenue. It displays the cash flow in the planning function in the appropriation request master data, as well as in overview planning.

When entering plan values for an appropriation request variant, you can enter an overall value and annual values. An annual value is an amount planned for a specific year. This year can be either the current year or a future year. The overall value is the value that is expected for the appropriation request as a whole. The overall value can be greater than or equal to the total of the annual values.

You can only plan overall and annual values for appropriation requests. It is not possible to plan according to cost elements or revenue elements as you can on orders or WBS elements.

On the investment program, you can manage plan values in multiple versions. The versions can represent various stages in the certainty of the planning, for example. At the appropriation request level, there are no versions. Instead you can define any number of variants for each appropriation request. You enter plan values for each of these variants, and assign it to a specific version of the investment program. The appropriation request variant represents, as a result, the various planning scenarios in the context of an appropriation request.

You can link the plan versions of an investment program to an approval process. Note that you can use authorization levels for plan versions, even if you do not have an investment program. If you assign an authorization level to a plan version, you can limit the processing of this version to certain users. The plan values of the appropriation request variants, which are assigned to this version, can then only be processed by users that have the authorization for this authorization level.

You roll up the plan values of appropriation requests in the investment program to which they are assigned using a periodic processing function. With the help of a status selection profile, you can select only those appropriation requests that have been approved (released).