Presented by Anand Seetharaju
SAP Margin Analysis (previously known as Account Based CO-PA) allows organizations to gain insights into their margins, revenues, and costs of specific market segments such as products, customers, material groups and other dimensions. The goal is to provide management with contribution margin information to aid in the decision-making process. With S/4HANA, you can perform Profitability Analysis using both the Costing-based CO-PA and Margin Analysis methods. SAP recommends Margin Analysis as the default solution even though both Costing-based and Margin Analysis can co-exist. This is because, only the Margin Analysis solution updates the universal journal (ACDOCA), and all future innovations will only be made for Margin Analysis.
The Attributed Profitability Segment feature exists only in the Margin Analysis solution in S/4HANA. This feature allows you to activate the derivation of profitability characteristics for income statement items which do not carry an account assignment to a profitability segment in in G/L line-item table ACDOCA, but instead to Cost Center or Internal Order for example. Hence it allows you to do detailed real-time analysis on your market dimensions. Additionally, this derivation of characteristics with the primary postings will free up time during your period-end activities by eliminating some closing activities. Without this feature, you will need to wait until period-end activities such as settlement, allocation and top-down distribution have been performed before you can report contribution margin by market segments.
Watch this session with CO Expert Anand Seetharaju, where you will learn the following:
- Margin Analysis in S/4HANA
- Overview of attributed profitability segment
- Configuration of attributed profitability segment
- Reporting and best practices
- Demo
- System limitations
Q&A
Q: How does this real-time COPA process interact with month end results analysis on cost objects when revenue or costs need to be deferred to the balance sheet?
A: Attributes can be updated to balance sheets to when settlement of result analysis is run, and values are posted to balance sheet accounts for deferred revenue. The balance sheet account flag needs to be enabled on the cost object configuration in KEATTR for WBS. I suggest you perform a proof of concept in sandbox to test this functionality.
Q: Is cost object controlling going away in Hana?
A: No. Recording actual cost on cost objects such as product cost by period, product cost by order, and product cost by sales orders are still same in S4.
Q: Are characteristics and dimensions used interchangeably or is there a difference?
A: Characteristics and dimension are used interchangeably in S4. Fiori reports/CDS view use dimensions. You may still see characteristics in the COPA configuration.
Q: Can you give a specific example of the best guess principle and how it may be refined at the month-end?
A: Several characteristics (e.g., product or product group) can be analyzed for interim reporting purpose in mid-month, for example, direct cost allocation or revenue by posting on a WBS or internal order. During the month-end close process, these entries can be reversed, or updated with actual settlement with correct characteristics to get the true results.
Q: Can I enhance the logic of attributed segment functionality with custom rules?
A: Yes. You can enhance the logic of attributed profitability segment with SAP delivered BAdI (BAdI BADI BADI_FINS_COPA_ATTRIB_PAOBJNR). This BADI interface contains method ATTRIB_LINE_ITEM_WITH_PAOBJNR to make changes.
About the Presenter:
Anand Seetharaju is an SAP S/4HANA financial and management accounting certified consultant and a CPA with more than 20 years of experience in consulting. His experience includes global SAP finance and controlling transformation projects for central finance, profitability analysis, project systems, product costing, material ledger, cash applications, capital asset management, leasing, global tax, and legal reporting.