SAP allocations, or more precisely, Assessments and Distributions offer a lot of flexibility in their design.  So much so, that you can get lost in the details pretty quickly.  We recently discovered a flaw in our approach to distributing Gross Margin from non-sales profit centers.  The problem was that the distribution did not carry the Functional Area of the original postings.  In fact, it wasn’t carrying a Functional Area at all and was getting the default functional area for revenue accounts, thus skewing a couple of metrics.  Luckily, the fix turned out to be really simple, even if it had to repeated a couple hundred times .

Getting Functional Area to Follow Original FA on Allocations

In both 3KE5 (3KE2 for change) – Assessment and 4KE5 (4KE2 for change) – Distributions, you need to put a functional area or a functional area set on the Senders/Receivers tab in order to get the posting to the Receiver to carry the same functional area as the Sender.  Here’s the screenshot of 4KE5:

In the example above, I used a set, FUNCT-ALL which includes all of our functional areas.  This will make sure that all functional areas are allocated, and that the Receiver postings get the same functional area as the original postings.  Originally, I thought leaving it blank would insure that all functional areas got allocated, and it did.  But the receiver postings had a blank functional area…unintended consequence.

Note that the functional area on the Receiver Tracing Factor tab indicates which functional areas will be included in determining the ratios for spread in aggregate.  It does not match up receiving functional areas with sending functional areas.  That’s kind of hard to explain without an example, so here goes:

So in this example, we have 2 profit centers with posting in 3 different functional areas.  Profit center 101 has 75% of the balance.  Note that the Receiver functional areas are not the same as the Sender FA.  When the posting occurs, all of the receiver values are aggregated by profit center and the posting occurs proportionally on the Sender’s functional areas, 1050, in this case.  Of course, back to the original message in this post, if you don’t have a functional area or set specified on the Senders/Receivers tab, it will happen the same way, except the receivers’ postings won’t get a functional area at all.

So there we go.  Most folks probably have that figured out already, but clearly not everyone

Cheers!

Byron

Popularity: 22%

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.