Use

Group costing provides a detailed display of complex procurement, production and sales relationships. Cost structures and value-added segments of each partner (such as plants and profit centers) are passed on to the next partner, retaining the costs of the previous level.

You can use group costing for the following:

Prerequisites

All the company codes are assigned to the same controlling area.

If you want to mark and release the results of group costing, or carry parallel values in actual data, you must define a currency and valuation profile in Customizing for General Controlling , and activate multiple valuation. If you only want to carry out planning simulation, you do not need these settings.

Integration

Features

Costing Using Multiple Valuation Approaches

In material costing, you can calculate prices using any of the legal, group, or profit center views. Material movements can be costed using three valuation approaches, as follows:

Deliveries between companies that carry out their own accounting are valuated using the legal view in accordance with the statutory accounting requirements for individual account closing.

Internal income calculations with independent valuation bases (that is, transfer prices) can be valuated in the profit center view . A fixed transfer price can be agreed for stock transfers between profit centers, and this can be included in the cost estimate.

To include transfer prices in the profit center cost estimate, define transfer prices based on a transfer price variant in Customizing for Profit Center Accounting. This transfer price variant is determined through the CO version. You can also define a different transfer price variant through the costing version in Customizing for Product Cost Planning. The entry in the costing version has priority over the CO version.

For more information, see Assigning Valuation Approaches to CO Versions and Determining Transfer Prices .

Goods movements between affiliated companies not involving intercompany profits are processed using the group view . This view determines the actual cost of goods manufactured for the group, and does not include any intercompany profits. You can, however, display internal profits as delta profits in the legal and/or profit center views.

When you define cost components, you can specify that internal profits between company codes and/or profit centers are shown in detail in the cost component split. You activate these delta profits for the group valuation in the attributes of the cost components.

For each cost component structure, there can only be one cost component under which the delta profit is shown. This means that neither the legal view nor the profit center view can have more than one cost component for the delta profit.

To cost multiple values, you define a costing type for each valuation approach in Customizing for Product Cost Planning. You use the costing type to specify which valuation approach you require. You define each costing type in a new costing variant and carry out a cost estimate with this costing variant.

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If you want to cost several different values, you can use the reference costing functions. You create a cost estimate for each valuation approach. In order to ensure that the various cost estimates are based on the same quantity structure, you can carry out costing based on a valuation approach and use this it as a reference for the other valuation views.

First you cost a valuation view, such as the operational valuation, then the other valuations. You make the setting for the operative valuation view in Customizing for General Controlling under  Organization Maintain Versions in the operative version (000). In order to cost the other valuation views, and in the process reference the valuation view costed, you define a reference variant in Customizing, and enter it in the costing variant.

In-Depth Detail of the Value-Added Chain: Partner Cost Component Split

You can display in detail the costs of materials and services of every company department in the value-added chain for every stage of the production process. The partner can be traced for every material used. To do this, you define a partner version, which enables the value-added portions of each manufacturing level to be displayed in detail. For further information about this, see Partners and Direct Partners .

The group cost component split can be displayed according to your partner definition. You can display the cost structures of the partners hierarchically according to your requirements, such as the company code segments on the highest level and the plant or profit center segments underneath.

To display partner cost component splits, define a partner version in Customizing and enter it in the costing type.

Additive Costs

In addition to the automatic cost estimate with quantity structure, you can enter additive data in the form of a unit cost estimate. (See Additive Costs and Unit Costing ).

ALE

Group costing can use the ALE functions. Partner cost component splits can be transferred from one system to another. For more information, see ALE/Distribution in Product Cost Planning and Group Costing in Distributed Systems .

See also:

For further information about the concept of transfer prices, see Transfer Prices and Update of Multiple Values by Material Costing in the SAP Library under Profit Center Accounting (EC-PCA).

For further information about multiple valuation approaches, see Multiple Currencies and Valuations for Materials in the SAP Library under Actual Costing/Material Ledger (CO-PC-ACT).

For more information about including transfer prices in Cost Object Controlling, see Transfer Prices in Cost Object Controlling in the SAP Library under Cost Object Controlling (CO-PC-OBJ) .

For more information about the relevant settings in Customizing, see the following: