ERPCorp SAP FICO Blog

You may wonder why I am writing a book on such a specific topic. I initially had similar thoughts myself and wondered if the topic of CO-PA and general ledger reconciliation necessitated a whole book. However, I have found that this topic comes up time and time again with my clients and believe that it is important to provide information in a detailed manner to help businesses effectively deal with the reconciliation of CO-PA to the general ledger.

We’ve been working on a project at Woodward to implement SAP Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0, Version for SAP NetWeaver (BPC).   This project is part of an overall roadmap aimed at unifying our financial systems across the company, while being able to maintain more than one ERP.  

Why should we worry about reconciling costing based Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) to the GL? After all, GL is the book of record from an external reporting stand point. However, CO-PA has several advantages that the GL does not provide. For example, CO-PA can give us details on revenue and cost of sales (COS) split by sales order, product line, customer, etc. as opposed to the GL, which gives us only total revenue and total COS. CO-PA allows us to drill down to the details of a company’s profitability – customer, product line, which can be especially useful when forecasting future sales/COS. Therefore, CO-PA is an important financial tool; however for it to be accurate, we need procedures to reconcile or explain differences between CO-PA and the GL. 

Our blog series on the most common SAP Controlling pitfalls and how to avoid them continues this week. SAP Controlling 2013 speaker Paul Ovigele discusses the most common pitfall is from his perspective.

The Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) module has been around about 15 years, and its original purpose was to enable businesses to produce market segment profitability reports predominantly based on sales data. It is particularly useful to users in the Finance and sales departments as it allows you to perform profitability analysis according to several dimensions (customer, product, country, salesperson etc.) and its real-time functionality aids quick and effective decision making. However, one pitfall of the Controlling module is the inability to automatically reconcile the CO-PA module with the General Ledger.

If you are using the Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) module, then you know that the task of mapping various objects to value fields is the key to ensuring that the reports are complete and accurate. The normal scenario is to assign amount fields such as sales conditions, general ledger accounts and production variances. However, it is also important to map quantity fields such as sales and production quantities to value fields (which are set up with a “quantity” attribute in transaction KEA6). Most sales and contribution margin reports contain these quantity values (for example Net Weight of products sold) in order provide the appropriate context for the reported revenue and cost of sales figures.

I will discuss the three main areas where you can make assignments to quantity fields in CO-PA: