ERPCorp SAP FICO Blog

You typically retrieve the standard price for purchased materials from purchasing info records during a costing run. Purchasing info records store vendor quotations per material as an estimate of your plan purchase price.

You post  purchase price variance (PPV) during goods and invoice receipts if the actual purchase price is different from standard. You use it to measure Purchasing performance and have Purchasing explain an increase in unfavorable PPV postings.

Businesses leverage Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to improve profitability by bringing significant improvement in financial and operational insight. With EPM improved operability and reduction of the cost of ownership with direct integration into SAP, S/4HANA provides integrated analytics solutions.

We use expertise, experiences, best practices, and methodologies using pre-packaged content including starter kits and pre-configured applications.

Businesses have leveraged Business Planning and Consolidations (BPC) for a year now and are now challenged by working with several new products at the same time, including SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) 7.4/7.5, the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) add-in, version 10.0 SP30 (frontend for standard SAP BPC), and SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office (frontend for embedded SAP BPC) and they need to decide if they need to go to BPC Embedded, Cloud or BPC S/4 HANA Standard.

Many companies operate in multiple regions and countries and need to report on their fixed assets based on various legal and valuation frameworks.

Parallel Valuation in Asset Accounting

SAP S/4HANA provides the tools and processes to fulfill these parallel valuation requirements. Some of these requirements can be technically challenging to meet, such as when you need to use different fiscal year variants (FY variants) in the different valuation frameworks.

I'm writing a book on SAP Product Cost Planning and in the process getting a better understanding of the importance of cost component views in product cost estimates.

The cost component split and cost component views provide valuable insight into a cost estimate. Setting up cost components correctly in a cost component structure leads you to a multi-faceted understanding of a product cost within a single cost estimate. At the beginning of the implementation our priority was to develop standard costs and we ignored additional information we could have obtained with a better understanding of cost component views.

If you experience long run-times during SAP Material Ledger close, this blog is for you. We explore how to expedite your SAP Material Ledger close.

Knowing how much your products cost is essential to determining actual profitability. Yet most decisions are based on the standard cost of your products since it is not easy to determine your actual costs. Actual costing by SAP Material Ledger bridges this gap. It provides you the ability to capture actual costs by tracking variances at the material level. Let's examine SAP Actual Costing.

GR/IR is the SAP process to perform the three-way match – purchase order, material receipt, and vendor invoice.  You use a clearing account to record the offset of the goods receipt (GR) and invoice receipt (IR) postings.  Once fully processed, the postings in the clearing account balance. 

Learn more about GR/IR and other SAP FICO topics. Please visit our new SAP FICO Learning Center please click here.

Clearing is performed at the purchase order (PO) line item level based on quantity entered. Price variance and exchange rate variance are calculated.  You can write off small differences using transaction MR11.

Purchase Price Variance
This discussion assumes you are using standard price control (S)  for purchased materials. The quantity and amount on the GR and IR postings are important. You must have posted GR to record purchase price variance (PPV). There is no PPV posting for just IR. There can be additional variance postings on IR after GR is posted for differences between PO price and actual price paid.

When posting GR, the price variance is based on the PO price, unless IR has already been posted, then it is based on actual price paid. If IR has already been posted, the GR will be based on the IR up to the quantity of the IR, after that is will use the PO price again.

After all postings to a PO line item, the net PPV posted will be the difference between the actual price paid and the standard cost of the material.

My company is in the early stages of moving from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA. I thought it would be interesting to give you my initial impressions of what I found out about Controlling in S/4HANA. Since we started out with ECC 6.0, we don’t have the baggage of things like classic G/L versus new G/L.

We first got access to an S/4HANA sandbox for a test drive of the system. This is an important step in the transition and has helped me get a much better understanding of how the new system works rather than reading documentation and watching training videos. What follows are my initial impressions. Hopefully, this will be useful if you are making the move, or contemplating it. 

I often get asked about difference between a Production Order and Process Order. When is it beneficial to use one over another?
As such, from controlling point of view, both objects have similar features. It is mainly on the Production Planning and Shop Floor Execution side where we see a difference. The main advantage of using Process Order is use of Process Instruction Sheet, or PI Sheet for day-to-day shop-floor activities. Whereas both the scenarios use Material Masters and Bills of Materials; Production Orders use Work Center (Machine) and Routing (sequence of operations) – Process Orders use Resource (Machine) and Recipe (sequence of operations and which component is issued during which operation). The decision on whether to go with Production Orders or Process Order would depend upon type of industry and fitment and is largely driven by the Production Planning team.

While we are on this topic of Production Orders and Process Orders, it might be beneficial to speak about other Cost Objects that are offered in Controlling.

Through my careers as cost accountant, accounting manager, project manager, and education consultant I’ve attended many SAP FICO conferences. My first experience with this particular conference was in 2014. I was impressed with the roster of speakers, the breadth of topics, and the size of the event. It is just large enough to draw a diverse cross section of SAP CO users and consultants and just small enough for you to be able to connect with others.

Where else could you chat over lunch with the legendary Janet Salmon?