Availability Control Settings (SAP Library

Availability Control Settings

Use

Availability control settings allow you to fine-tune budget monitoring for individual activities (for example earmarked funds, purchase requisitions, actual postings).

Prerequisites

You make the settings in the Funds Management Customizing. For more information, go to the IMG Funds Management Government and choose Budgeting and Availability Control ® Budget Profiles ® Maintain Budget Profiles, or Budgeting and Availability Control ® Availability Control.

Features

Basic settings

In the budget profile, you can determine whether the budget values are checked against overall budgets, annual budgets, released overall budgets, released annual budgets.

Defining tolerance limits

You can define a usage rate and/or absolute variance as a tolerance limit for a combination of budget profile, activity group and action.

The usage rate represents the ratio of funds assignment to budget, expressed as a percentage.
The absolute variance represents the difference between funds assignments and the budget, expressed as an absolute amount.

If you have defined an absolute tolerance limit and a relative tolerance limit, the lower of the two is used in the check.

Note

Absolute and Relative Tolerances when Budget is 0

If you have defined in the budget profile that availability control is to be performed against the annual budget and you then try to post an actual or commitment value for a future year which does not yet have a budget, the system treats the posting according to the tolerance limits set.

For example: the posting of EUR 1000 with a relative tolerance limit expressed in % is rejected (because the system assumes a zero budget). However, if you have set up an absolute tolerance of EUR 5000, for example, instead of a relative tolerance, the system will accept it.

Absolute and Relative Tolerances for Revenues FM Account Assignments

The total of revenues must not be less than zero, for example, as a result of transfers. If you have defined an absolute tolerance, the total of revenues must not be less than this.

If you have entered negative budget values in a revenues FM account assignment, the availability control checks the debits for the revenues FM account assignment against this budget. The debit must not exceed the negative budget. The logic used for checking revenues line items is the same as the one used for checking expenditures line items except that the budget has the opposite +/- sign.

Absolute and relative tolerance for unilateral and reciprocal cover eligibility and revenues increasing the budget

In these functions, availability control does not take the tolerances defined in Customizing into account. The usage level is automatically 100%.

For information on the actions triggered when the tolerance limits are exceeded, read Availability Control Actions.

For information on the things that you should take note of when allocating negative budget, see Entering Negative Budget.

Defining specific tolerance limits

You can define tolerance limits specific to individual budget structure elements. These specific tolerances override the general ones.

Different behavior of availability control during commitment postings

You can control that the budget cannot be exceeded by certain postings (such as purchase orders), whereas other postings (such as purchase requisitions) may be posted in any amount. For more information, see Availability Control for Commitments Postings.

Activating/deactivating availability control

Check for expenditures FM account assignments

In the standard system, availability control is active for all fiscal years.

Check for revenues FM account assignments

Postings to revenues FM account assignments are not checked in the standard system. You must activate this check in Customizing.

Check on each transaction in the "transaction chain"

In the standard setting, the tolerance limits are only checked, if the assigned value is increased by a posting against the previous debit. You can change the standard settings by stipulating in Customizing that the tolerance limit be checked individually for each transaction posted. You can use this function for a number of purposes, for example, you can set stricter tolerance limits for purchase orders than for purchase requisitions, making it possible for the budget to be exceeded by purchase requisitions, but not by purchase orders.

Activities

Availability control monitors the funds available in line with the settings you have entered.

You can check whether availability control is active and how it is configured in the budgeting display or change mode of budgeting functions (original budget, releases, etc.). To do this, choose Extras ® Availability Control ® Info. If availability control is not active, there is no display.