Unilateral and Reciprocal Cover Eligibility 
Use
You can use unilateral and reciprocal cover eligibility to make expenditure budget that has not been consumed in one area available for other areas as additional budget if required.
Prerequisites
Customizing
To be able to use unilateral and reciprocal cover eligibility, you must have executed the following steps in Funds Management Government Customizing.
Create Budget Subtype
Make Settings for Budget Subtypes
Define Budget Subtypes for Automated Postings
Maintain Cover Eligibility Profile
Assign Cover Eligibility Profile to FM Area
CreateNumberRangesfor Cover Pools (Reciprocal Cover Eligibility)
AssignNumberRangefor Cover Pools to FM Area (Reciprocal Cover Eligibility)
Activate Automated Procedure for Cover Eligibility
If an expenditure FM account assignment is to participate in all three cover eligibility procedures - revenues increasing the budget in the call procedure, unilateral cover eligibility and reciprocal cover eligibility - you must define the order in which the budget available from the "cover eligibilities" is used in this step.
You can also define that a warning or an error message is issued by the active availability control when the budget is exceeded by setting the corresponding indicator for each cover eligibility procedure.
For more information, see the documentation for these steps in the Funds Management Government Implementation Guide.
Master Data Maintenance
Rules must be defined in master data maintenance to determine the cover eligibility relationships (entitled to cover, subject to cover) between FM account assignments.
Additional Requirements
You should be aware that, aside from the necessary Customizing settings, unilateral and reciprocal cover eligibility can only be used if the following conditions are met:
Budget structure functions must be used and the budget object must be defined in the Budget Structure
Active availability control must check against years based on the valid budget profile.
For more information, see the Funds Management Government Implementation Guide (IMG) in section Maintain Budget Profiles .
The commitment type profile function which controls the Behavior of Availability Control for Commitment Postings must not be activated.
If you have defined in the update profile that the active availability control must check against releases, the released budget is automatically eligible for cover.
This restriction does not apply for German Government customers.
You must reconstruct the assigned values after budget allocation and before the first posting, in order to update cover eligibility correctly. For more information, see Reconstructing Assigned Values .
Process Flow
The process begins with the posting of a business transaction which generates assigned values based on the definitions in the valid Update Profile When posting this business transaction, for example, when a vendor invoice is received, active availability control (AAC) checks if sufficient budget is still available in the given expenditures FM account assignment. AVC does not take the tolerance limits defined in Customizing into account, it assumes a usage level of 100 %.
If this is not the case, the program checks if the expenditure FM account assignment is authorized to take budget from another expenditure FM account assignment; it checks if the expenditure FM account assignment is assigned to another expenditure FM account assignment in rule maintenance for unilateral or reciprocal cover eligibility.
If such an assignment exists, the program checks if the assigned expenditure FM account assignment(s) has budget eligible for cover available. If it does, the expenditure FM account assignment can use the budget of the assigned expenditure FM account assignment(s). No budget transfer takes place. A cross-assigned value is generated for the budget-issuing FM account assignment from the posted amount. The amount is only noted for information purposes in expenditure FM account assignment using the budget.
If an expenditure FM account assignment is participating in a cover pool, it may "help itself" in turn from the expenditure FM account assignments. With reference to individual FM account assignment, no order is defined as to which FM account assignment may first "help itself" from another; the same holds true for the order if the budget of the first FM account assignment found is not sufficient. You can use characteristic groups and their characteristics to group together individual expenditures FM account assignments within an expenditure cover pool for priority checking with active availability control. For more information, see Grouping Expenditure FM Account Assignments .
The following graphic summarizes the process flow again
Result
You can display the current assignments existing in the budget-issuing expenditure FM account assignments and the budget-claiming expenditure FM account assignments in the information system in the Cross-assignments and Outside Usage report. You can also display the outside usages for each expenditures FM account assignment in the Commitments/Actuals for Assigned Budget line items report.
You can cancel the cross assignments at any given time by restructuring the budget from the budget-issuing expenditure FM account assignments to the budget-consuming expenditure FM account assignments. For more information on this topic, see Resolve Cross Assignments .
You should be aware that only a limited number of elements that are eligible for cover are checked. You must therefore execute program Indicate FM account assignment as eligible for cover (RFFMKT50) every night.