For capital investments that do not have an asset under construction, there is often the need to capitalize acquisitions directly in asset accounting, while still managing plan values, budgets, actual values and commitments for cost accounting, in order to carry out target/actual comparisons. The plan and budget values for these direct capitalizations are normally in blanket form, since they are not related directly to the individual acquisitions. Instead they normally take the form of an overall estimate.

You can attach the blanket investment budget for a statistical order or WBS element to an investment program position, just as you do individual investment measures. The statistical order or WBS element then receives its budget from there.

At the level of the WBS element or order, you have the option of an active availability control in addition to the passive availability control using reporting. This active control enables you to prevent assignments that would cause the budget to be exceeded. The system checks the budget when certain transactions are entered. It determines if the available project budget or the available released budget is still sufficient. When making the availability control, the system uses tolerance limits you entered in Customizing.

In order to use the active availability control, you have to enter it in the budget profile of the statistical order or WBS element.

In order to be able to manage blanket budgets as individual investment program positions, you have to make sure there is a 1:1 relationship between the investment program end nodes involved and the statistical WBS elements or orders.

Blanket budgets are usually valid for only one year. Therefore, you should create new statistical WBS elements or orders for your blanket budgets, and attach them to the investment program. WBS elements and orders allow you to manage plan values and budget values by year, but it is generally not desirable to accumulate overall plan, budget and actual values for the order or WBS element over the course of several years.

When you have a large number of blanket budgets, it makes sense to use a project for them rather than an order. You should define the structure of the project so that it consists only of top WBS elements. Each of these top WBS elements manages a blanket budget. At the fiscal year change, you can then copy the old project. You can rename the keys of the WBS elements belonging to the project using the search and replace function.