Cumulative Processing of Allocation Cycles 

Use

You process an allocation cycle cumulatively to clear any fluctuations of the tracing factors or sender amounts to be allocated.

The allocation is usually performed by period, meaning that posted values are allocated for a sender in a period according to tracing factors entered in this period. If the tracing factors or the sender amounts to be allocated fluctuate to a great extent, an assignment of the allocated costs based on source is not possible during processing by period.

These fluctuations can be negated by cumulative processing of tracing factors or sender values. Cumulative processing smoothes the allocations over the periods.

A publishing company produces periodicals that appear at least once a month as well as less frequent publications. Sales and administration costs are assessed to profit centers with the monthly sales volume serving as the allocation base.

·         With a non-cumulative assessment, overhead costs are not debited for periodicals that do not appear in certain months. Nonetheless, production of these goods does generate sales and administration costs even in such months. The periodicals that appear at least once a month are additionally debited with these sales and administration costs. Over a period of time, the periodicals that appear at least once a month have to bear too large a share (and the others too small a share) of the sales and administration costs.

·         With a cumulative assessment, allocation of the sales and administration costs is smoothed over the months. Periodicals that do not appear for a certain month are debited with sales and administration costs according to their share of cumulative sales volume.

In some countries, “smoothing” with allocation is a legal requirement. Using cumulative allocation, therefore, these legal obligations are fulfilled.

Some sold-to parties (public sold-to parties, for example) even stipulate such a smoothing to prevent manipulation of expenses.

Prerequisites

·         Sender/receiver relationships remain stable over the fiscal year.

You must not delete senders or receivers within the fiscal year. The system checks this condition during cumulative processing.

Deleting senders or receivers that existed in previous periods that no longer exist (or are no longer valid) in the current period due to master data checks or cycle changes will cause erroneous allocations.

Increasing the allocation network is, however, non-critical.

·         You use the sender rule Posted amounts and the receiver rule Variable portions.
Only with this rule combination will a cumulation on sender and receiver-side actually occur.

Collective execution of cumulative and non-cumulative cycles is not possible.

Features

If you execute an allocation cycle cumulatively, the sender amounts posted up to the current period are allocated to the receiver as a result of tracing factors. Cumulative processing always cumulates from period 1.

The determined allocation amounts, too, are cumulated for each receiver and posted in the current period minus the amounts allocated to the respective receiver in the previous periods. Postings in previous periods are thus unchanged.

Only those amounts for the receivers that were posted in the previous periods using the appropriate cumulative processing are taken into account.

If you perform cumulative processing for a period interval and have already posted cycles from the “To” period, the SAP System reverses all periods from the “To” period up to and including the last posted period. The system displays a confirmation messages.

You should not change the Cumulative indicator during the current fiscal year.

The scaling of negative tracing factors is only applied to the cumulative total tracing factor for one receiver, not to the values of the tracing factors in the individual periods.

Reversing Cumulative Processing

If you wish to reverse cumulative processing, you must reverse up to the last posted period due to period-independent work methods.

In online execution, you can trigger reversal of subsequent already posted periods via a dialog box. If subsequent periods are already posted, reversal is not performed in the background.

You wish to reverse a cumulative cycle in period 3, however periods 1 to 5 were already posted. Reversal of period 3 is only possible in conjunction with periods 4 and 5.