Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

The cost center reports in SAP are normally displayed in Controlling Area currency. This means that if you have several company codes that have different currencies but belong to the same controlling area, the standard cost center reports will only be displayed in the currency of that controlling area. This is okay if you only want to display the cost center reports on a consolidated level; however if you want to be able to report the cost center values in the currency of the company code that the cost center belongs to, you would need to make the necessary setting in order to do so.

Firstly, you would need to set the reporting currency appropriately in your controlling user settings. To do this, go to transaction RPC0 and scroll to the tab called “Reporting Currency”. Here you can choose which currency you want the reports to be displayed in. If you have not made any settings in this transaction before, it is most likely that the “Controlling Area Currency” button will be the default setting. You should therefore click on the “Object Currency” setting if you want the reports to be displayed in the currency of the company code that the cost center belongs to. Note that the term “Object” relates not only to cost centers but to any other cost object that is used in Overhead Cost Controlling, such as internal orders, WBS elements, business processes, and so on.

When you save the settings in transaction RPC0, you will see that the next time you go to a cost center report such as with transaction S_ALR_87013611, the values with be displayed in the respective cost center currencies. One problem that you may find here is that you will no longer be able to view data from cost centers have different currencies (that is cost centers that belong to company codes in different countries) in one screen. The system will instead show an “X” character in areas where it cannot add two amounts that belong to different currencies. You will therefore need to have the flexibility to display the report in object currency as well as in controlling area currency without having to switch the settings in transaction RPC0 back and forth from Controlling Area to Object currency.

To switch the currency directly in the report you will first need to activate the “Expert Mode” indicator. To do this when you have executed the relevant cost center report, go to the top-menu “Settings -> Options” and check the “Expert Mode” checkbox. When you press the ‘Enter’ key you will see a few extra buttons appear in the top part of the report. One of these buttons is the “Currency Translation” button (which has the “Dollar” and “Yen” symbols on it). You can then click on the radio button “Translate to Target Currency”, and specify the currency and exchange rate type that you want to use to translate the report, and also choose which columns of the report should be translated.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

This is a continuation of my previous blog, in which I describe how you can use translation keys for foreign currency conversion in drilldown reports. This functionality is useful in cases where you want to convert financial data into a specified currency at some point after the transaction has been posted. For example, you may have a month end rate, which is provided by a parent company or affiliate, and you want your reports to be translated at that rate at the end of the closed month. You can enter the rate for your specified exchange rate type using transaction OB08, and then use the Currency Translation button in the drilldown report to pick this rate up.

When you use the Currency Translation functionality, you have to decide what section of the report you want to translate. If you want the currency translation to apply to the whole report, simply follow the instructions described above. However, if you have different columns in the report and you want a different currency translation for each column, you will need to click somewhere in that column and hit the Currency Translation button. You will notice that in the ensuing pop-up box, a new section called “Area of Validity” appears in the top-part of the screen and it describes the specific line of the column that you clicked on. This may seem like the currency translation will only relate to that line, however it really relates to the whole column that the line exists in. You can then select the relevant currency and translation type that you want the column to be translated to.

If you do not want to keep selecting the Currency Translation button and change the settings key every time you want to convert the report’s currency, you may want to save the definition of the report so that it always defaults to the specified currency at the appropriate rate.

In order to save the definition of a drilldown report, you can go to the top-menu of the report and select the option “Report -> Save Definition”. You will then get a message at the bottom of the screen saying that the report has been saved. Alternatively, you can click on the “Save” icon, which also does the same thing. Note however, that you can only have one setting saved per report. This means that if (say) you set the currency of the report to convert to Euros at a month end rate, you will always have this setting when you execute the report. If you change the currency setting to Canadian Dollars, this will overwrite the previous setting. If you want to delete your setting or bring it back to the default currency you would need to do the following: When you execute the report, click on the Currency Translation button and then click on the “Database Currency” button, which is at the bottom of the pop-up box; then click on the ‘Save’ button so that the changes are stored.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

Drilldown reports have become more widespread with the latest versions of SAP ERP. What used to be available only for management reports in the Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) and Project Systems (PS) modules is now being used for financial statement reporting (with the SAP General ledger), Accounts Payable and Receivable Reports and many others. For that reason I want to show you a way that you can easily convert amounts that are displayed in drilldown reports into different currencies.

A typical example of where this may be used is when you have a month-end translation rate that you apply to your financial transactions at the end of the month. Although SAP translates currencies on a real-time basis, the rates are usually on a historical basis and will not reflect any short-term fluctuations that may have occurred.

You probably already know that SAP can translate the values from one currency to another as long as you have maintained the currency pair in the exchange rate table (TCURR). This table stores currencies by Exchange Rate Type. The default exchange rate type that is used in all company codes is “M – Average Rate” (unless you decide to change it to a different exchange rate type per document type in transaction OBA7). This means that any foreign currency is translated into the company code currency using this exchange rate. If you also want to translate your figures into a different exchange rate using an exchange rate type other than M, you would need to create a translation key by doing the following:

Go to transaction SM30 and enter table V_T242Q and hit the “Maintain” button. You will be prompted to enter an Application class (this controls which module the settings are to be maintained for). Choose the appropriate application class according to the drop-down list. Note that for the SAP General Ledger, you should choose Application class “FBRG - FI: Flexible general ledger”. You can then click on “New Entries” and enter a description for the Currency Translation Type, and enter the exchange rate type that you want to use (in the exchange rate table). You can then choose whether you want a fixed or variable ‘To Currency’ and ‘Currency Translation Date’ and whether you want an ‘Inverse Exchange Rate’. When you press the ‘Enter’ key you will be asked for the relevant ‘To Currency’ and ‘’Currency Translation Date’. You only need to specify these if you want them to be fixed, if not simply hit the ‘Enter’ key again. You can then save your settings and return to the initial screen.

In order to utilize the translation key that you set up, you need to ensure that the exchange rate type that you specified has been maintained for the relevant currencies in the exchange rate table (TCURR).

To change the currency displayed on a drilldown report to the one that you have set up, you need to execute the relevant drilldown report and click on the “Currency Translation” button (which has the “Dollar” and “Yen” sign on top of the number “100”) and enter the ‘To currency’ and drop-down in the “Translation Key” field. You will then see all the translation keys that exist, and you can choose the one that you have set up for the specific currency translation that you want.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

Additive costs are extra costs that are added to a material’s cost estimate which are not calculated through the system. They are used in addition to the costs that are calculated automatically by the system using BOMs, routings, special procurement keys and other methods. A typical example of when you would use additive costs is when you have a warehouse that products are shipped to from your plant. The transportation costs for shipping the products should be added to the cost of the product at the warehouse. For example, if the cost of the product at the plant is $1 per lb and the transportation cost to get the product to the warehouse is $.10 per lb, the standard cost at the warehouse should be $1.10 per lb.

The transaction to enter additive costs is CK74N. You enter the material, plant and costing variant in the relevant fields and then hit the ‘Enter’ key. You then enter the “Costing From”, “Costing Due” and “Valuation” dates and hit the ‘Enter’ key again. The screen “Create Unit Cost Estimate – List Screen” then appears. Here you enter the values as follows:

When you save the entries the cost will be added to the cost estimate of the product when it is calculated.

The problem with additive costs is that you can only enter them for a single material at a time. This could be quite cumbersome if you have several materials which need to have additive costs entered (which is normally the case). There is currently no standard program to update additive costs on a mass basis, so you have the options of either creating a custom program or creating an LSMW object. I prefer the latter as it does not require the assistance of a programmer.

You should create the LSMW using the Batch Input recording method. The transaction the recording should be based on should be CK74. The new additive costs transaction CK74N does not seem to work as well. Most of the generic steps needed to create this LSMW can be learned by reading the documentation on the SAP Help site. I will however, detail the fields that need to be specified in the “Maintain Source Fields” step. They are as follows:

One thing to note is that if you entered a “Costing Date To” value of 12/31/9999 (which is typical when cost estimates are created), the next time you execute the LSMW the system will give you a message saying that a cost estimate already exists and will ask if you want to overwrite this. For that reason the LSMW’s batch input session will not be able to run in the background unless you confirm the message for each material (which could be a painstaking exercise). To avoid this, you may need to create a different LSMW for changing additive costs which is based on transaction CK75.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

In my previous blog, I describe how you can derive a partner function from the header or line item level of a sales order. The CO-PA characteristic that is used as a target field in the derivation, can either be a system characteristic or a user-defined one (which begins with “WW”). If you want to use a system characteristic then you do not read to create a derivation, since the CO-PA reference table “PAPARTNER” contains the basic partner functions that you can report on.  If however, you use a user-defined characteristic, you may find that you have the issue of not inheriting the text that comes with the field that you are deriving. A user-defined characteristic either inherits its text from the source tale that it is based on, or needs to have its characteristic values entered manually using transaction KES1. Unless the characteristic values do not appear anywhere else in the system, you would normally want to pull the values from a source table, otherwise you will end up updating two tables (the source table and the CO-PA table) anytime there is a change or addition to the data.

Firstly, let’s talk about the nature of the field that is used in the partner function table. Taking two common examples of partner functions – Ship-To Party and Salesperson, you could either have a value based on a customer field (KUNNR) or one based on a personnel number field (PERNR). You will notice that in my previous blog, target field was based on the personnel number. This means that the sales people were set up as master data objects in the Human Resources (HR) module.

With a user-defined characteristic, you will need to specify where the system will pull the text values from, otherwise you will be left with only the characteristic value and not the description. For example, if the salesperson’s number and name is “00001 – John Adams”, the system will derive the value “00001” only. The key to dealing with this issue is to set up the characteristic and specify the relevant check table, text table and text field accordingly. If the characteristic has already been created you will notice the the check table, text table and text fields are grayed out and cannot be modified. You will therefore need to update the field catalog directly.

To update the field catalog you would need to go to transaction SM30 and enter table V_TKEF and click on the “Maintain” button. You can then scroll to the characteristic that you want to modify and double-click on the relevant line. You will then notice that the fields for check and text table/fields are open for modification. You can then enter the relevant values (you would need to find out the relevant table/fields to enter for that characteristic. This can be obtained by looking at a similar characteristic and copying the values that exist there).

You can then save the settings in the field catalog and regenerate the operating concern so that the correct characteristic values are adopted when the field is derived.

For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP  which is published by SAP Press.