Reduce the Number of Costing Run Messages with Material Status
A six-month or annual cost rollup is a task most accountants usually don’t look forward to. R/3 removes a lot of the routine, manual work, typically reducing the time taken from a month to just several days. However, there’s more to the task than just executing the costing run. The cost accountant’s role becomes one of analyzing costing run messages and taking action on any highlighted problems.
These problems usually include logistics master data issues that need correction, such as a missing bill of materials (BOM) or routing (task list) for an in-house-produced assembly. However, as you will see, the system can also generate unnecessary error messages. This article describes one source of such error messages and presents a little-known technique – the use of the material status field in the material master -- to reduce the volume of messages to be analyzed. This allows cost accountants to spend more time addressing the issues arising from relevant messages. First, I'll give some background on system messages.
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