Financial Planning: Validation Rules blocking input for unassigned member

[sebassmit]

Hi community,

Please have a look at the following case and let me know if you have a suggestion or work-around for this!

Case

We have a classic account Financial Planning model with several dimensions: Profit Center, Cost Center, G/L Account (account dimensions), Date. Also, we configured Validation Rules for this model and would like to start planning and ultimately export the financial planning data to S/4 HANA. Planners should be able to plan data at any level, meaning that it should be possible to enter data at Profit Center level (set Cost Center to unassigned) and Cost Center level (select a Cost Center and its corresponding Profit Center). Validation rules check whether the selected level is a valid combination based on the Profit Center property in the Cost Center dimension.

The way Validation Rules determine whether unassigned is a valid combination is described as follows.

Meaning that an unassigned Cost Center is considered valid combination with a Profit Center, if there is existing combination with any other Cost Center for that certain Profit Center.

Problem

When we are planning data at Profit Center level, we have some Profit Centers that have no underlying Cost Center. Thus, the Validation Rules do not allow input. We were surprised by this, but SAP Support informed us that this designed behavior of the Validation Rules. We are looking for a workaround to be able to plan at Profit Center level while the validation rules are active.

Not sure about the following but it is possible to export data from SAC to S/4 HANA that is published to a Profit Center and unassigned Cost Center. EDIT: Confirmed by the comments.

[edward_zhang2]

Hi sebas-smit ,

Thank you for the question, I am one of the developer of the corresponding topic. Indeed, this is the most critical issue to us that is confusing the customers, we receive lots of tickets regarding to this. They have the same requests to enter data on those unassigned members which even not exist in the validation rule combinations. The main reason why we go for this approach is because of performance. It will cause very critical performance downgrade at backend calculation engine especially there are lots of members in dimension. We observed it was 5x slower than case without rules.

The workaround I can propose is to create a dummy member in matched dimension, this dummy member is only generated to make the profit center valid for data entry. Just make sure no data is entered to the dummy member, then the data will be automatically set to the profit center and # member in unbooked mode.

But we will consider this as a important requirement and talk to backend team to figure out a way to achieve it.

Regards

Edward

[JefB]

Hi Edward, performance should not impact usability. Time and effort spend in projects to figure out the situation alone is huge.

[sebassmit]

Hi edward.zhang2,

Thank you for reaching out! It is good to know that this topic is under investigation by the development team since multiple tickets have been raised. I really appreciate your explanation about the reason for this approach which is unfortunate but very understandable. So, thank you very much. 🙂

I have some scale issues with implementing your proposed workaround. There are about 60 ProfitCenters without a Cost Carrier and if I create a dummy I have to add these ProfitCenters to the property of the dummy member. This will require multiple dummy variables if I am correct, since there are only 127 characters allowed in the dimension property string (3031564). One Influence Request which adresses this is 277515.

There is some additional complexity since we have two cost carrier dimensions in the model (CostCenter and WBS-Element). Ultimately, every ProfitCenter should have a CostCenter and WBS-Element to be able to plan on the unassigned member for all ProfitCenters. So the workaround might not work in our (complex) case.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

[Mastan]

Hi Sebastian,

Please check this documentation for Exporting data from SAC to S/4 HANA Cloud, Hope it is helpful

Exporting Plan Data to SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud | SAP Help Portal

Thanks,

Mastan

[sebassmit]

Hello mastan1210,

Thank you for reaching out!

My problem is with entering data on an unassigned Cost Center since my Validation Rules are blocking the input. This is caused by the design of validation rules. We were able to export data on Cost Center unassigned though.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

[Susanne_Helbig]

Dear sebastian_smit,

it's possible to export plan data from SAC to ACDOCP table in S/4HANA with cost center = unassigned.
Please follow the instructions in Exporting Plan Data to SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud | SAP Help Portal, shared by Mastan.

Best regards
Susanne

[sebassmit]

Hello susannehelbig,

Thank you for reaching out!

My problem is with entering data on an unassigned Cost Center since my Validation Rules are blocking the input. This is caused by the design of validation rules. We were able to export data on Cost Center unassigned though.

Kind regards,

Sebastian