Cost centers

Organizational unit in which costs are incurred. Each work center is linked to a single cost center. The following are planned for each cost center:

Activity types

The activities performed at a cost center are classified into activity types. Activities are valuated with prices that are either set manually by the user or established by the system iteratively for all cost centers. In the latter case, the system computes the activity prices by dividing the planned costs of a cost center assigned to the activity types by the planned activity (or, depending on the system setting, by the capacity).

Actual costs are collected for each cost center. You can determine actual activity prices for the individual activity types, and revaluate the object that used the activities of the cost center.

Cost elements

Each posted cost must be assigned to a cost element. The following types of cost elements are used:

The cost element category specifies the business transactions for which a cost element can be used.

The following primary cost element categories are used in Cost Object Controlling:

These can be debited with all primary postings (such as FI or MM). Accounting documents are generated for these postings.

These are required, for example, for settling order or project costs to CO-external objects. CO-external objects are objects such as fixed assets (AM), materials (MM), or G/L accounts (FI). Settlement generates an accounting document.

The primary cost elements are linked to G/L accounts in Financial Accounting .

The following secondary cost element categories are used in Cost Object Controlling:

These are used for settling order or project costs to CO-internal objects. CO-internal objects are such things as orders, profitability segments, cost centers, and projects.

These are used for saving the data generated during WIP calculation or results analysis on the order or project.

These are used to allocate overhead from cost centers to orders, projects, and other objects.

These are used by the system in internal activity allocation to allocate costs.

Secondary cost elements are only used within the Controlling component.

Cost element groups

These group together similar cost elements.

In Cost Object Controlling, the cost element groups are used to group costs for settlement as well as to create reports.

Revenue elements

Some cost objects such as sales order items and internal orders with revenue can carry revenues as well as costs. Revenues use the following cost element categories: