Tracking Real Estate Facility costs across company codes

[Former Member]

My current client is consolidating its real estate portfolio to be able to report on all facilities from a centralized company code. The problem is that certain facilities are currently in company codes that do not track expenses per facility, others track them within cost centers and others within internal orders.  Internal Orders are used extensively in the organization (overall I think there are hundreds of thousands – so I am reluctant to suggest creating ten plus internal orders for each facility to track individual types of expenses per facility)

Here are a couple of questions that I would be grateful for help (feel free to answer one, some or all)

1. 1) Can you post a single line to both an internal order and a statistical order? Thus can I create a single statistical order for each facility, use Exit COOPA0003 to create custom fields and use this statistical order in addition to internal orders already used by certain entities?

1. 2) Is it possible to create an alternative hierarchy for only real estate facilities and post to these? Thus, can you post to 2 cost centers at the same time, of which one of the cost centers is the alternative hierarchy cost center? If the cost is captured through an internal order that settles to a cost center, can I also post to the alternative hierarchy?

1. 3) And now …. wishful thinking …. Is there a field in FI that I can open that can track these real estate facility costs no matter how it is currently captured in ECC?

Thanks in advance. If you have solved a similar problem, or have an idea of how it could be solved, please feel free to comment.

[sanilbhandari · Accepted solution]

Hi

We had more or less same kind of a requirement in my project, where in we had multiple Malls in Company Code. A budgeting as well as actual facility was required to keep track of expenses. We had created a WBS hierarchy. So if I had two malls one in New Delhi and other in Mumbai, I could create one single project and each Mall was represented as the lowest level WBS on which the cost was booked. Prior to going to WBS Route, we had different company codes or facility following a different approach just like your case, for eg, on Cost Center or on IO. However, we brought in an uniform process for everyone. The nature of expenses were represented by different cost elements like electricity, personnel, maintenance and so on.

So you may want to do a process harmonization on how the costs are booked and probably use WBS Hierarchy structure to tracks such costs

Thanks & regards

Sanil Bhandari

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Sanil,

WBS elements was one of the ways I was thinking of going. One thing is that they are already using WBS-elements to track some capital projects that relates to some of these facilities. The question would then be if I need to create a new hierarchy that incorporates and replaces all these WBS-elements, or if I can keep them and have the new structure as a secondary cost capturing mechanism.

So some quick questions:

1. Do you also budget at the lowest level?

2. Do you reuse the WBS-elements year after year, or create new ones each year?

3. Is it possible to post to two WBS-elemts at the same time?

4. Do you have/calculate key performance figures? If yes, what tools (e.g. BPC. BEx) are used?

Thanks in advance!!!

[sanilbhandari · Accepted solution]

Hi

To give you a more background, we have a seperate Project profile created for such Projects and it is completely separated from Capital Projects. It has a different budget profile. So I would suggest you have a different hierarchy for such projects. Depending on expected business tenure, you can decide on the time frame. In our case, we have set up 10 year time frame for such projects and budgets are set up overall and also on yearly basis. It is not possible to post to two WBS Elements at the same time. You can have only one actual account assignment object in a line item. There are many reports available to keep track of expenses. Please search under Project System. You can also use BW Cubes to extract the information through BW

Hope that answers your question.

Regards

Sanil Bhandari