The Investment Program (SAP Library - Investment Management (IM))

The Investment Program

Definition

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.

Use

You can use an investment program to manage all measures (orders/projects) that belong to one controlling area, when the currency and fiscal year variant of this controlling area agree with those specified 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.

Planning and Budgeting

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 are internal orders, WBS elements, and maintenance orders.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text

Structure of an Investment Program with Planning and Budgeting of Program Positions and Measures
Approval Year

You always have to enter a specific fiscal year as the approval year for a program. In the IM context, 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 return the budget to the investment program (refer to Supplements and Returns). You then have to budget the measure again in a later approval year.

You keep the budget distributed to the measure on the measure, and change only the distribution to the years within the measure.

Note

The key and the approval year together uniquely identify an investment program. You can copy an investment program to a new approval year at the time of the fiscal year change (refer to Fiscal Year Change) while still keeping its key. Therefore it is best not to make the approval year part of the key (for example, IPRG97).

Programs That Apply Across Controlling Areas

You can centrally define an investment program that applies across different 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, namely the fiscal year variant and controlling area currency specified in the investment program definition.

Since the controlling area has to be the same within a given subtree of an investment program, you have to create multiple top program positions for an investment program that applies to several controlling areas. This means you have to create at least one top program position for each controlling area.