How can we replicate costing based CO-PA in source to account based CO-PA in Central Finance?

[former_member587659]

I want to understand how we can replicate costing based CO-PA in a ERP source system into an account based CO-PA in the Central Finance target system.

From few blogs, I understand replication from costing based to account based in not supported by SAP out of box and with S/4 HANA 1709, a tool set has been provided to facilitate this that includes CO-PA mapping tool and enhanced replication features. I wanted to understand this in more detail but struggling to find good content.

[sanilbhandari · Accepted solution]

Hi abhab

You are correct that the replication of Costing based COPA in source to account based COPA is not something out of standard in central finance and I had extremely tough time to put it the least doing that in one of my projects 😞

Let us start with the basics: First you need to be sure how data is mapped in your source system, costing based COPA. I had created a detailed worksheet with all the postings to value field and to see if I could map it to specific GL. This is extremely critical since it is pretty much what would define, what kind of reconcilliation efforts can be avoided post start of replication. You should clearly identify the cost elements and their right cost element category. The mapping should also be done in the target central finance system for the same. Additionally you should check if there are any statistical condition types in your source system SD billing. You should check if you can before central finance implementation get them to post into GL in source itself. That is what we did in my project, which had almost 40 countries posting the data in at least three source SAP system. Once you have a clear picture of how CB COPA is created in the source system, you should identify how it would be posted in the target AB COPA. So you should have one mapping sheet for the GL. I have included a sample for SD Billing which I had used in my project:

Now there were quite a few additional challenges as well. My customer was using WBS Elements for Opex Budgeting for Adv and Trade promotions. The settlement of WBS was to COPA in source. However, WBS Elements were not replicated in Central Finance, so they were mapped to IO in target system and that is how AB COPA was updated in the target system. Another challenge faced was regarding the COGS Split which is a feature, which is available in S/4HANA but not in CB COPA, so you have to check specifically how you would tackle the same, since COGS split happens only in case of delivery in S/4HANA, whereas the value is recognized in CB COPA in Billing document. In our customer, it was a main requirement and we had to handle the same through some amount of custom code.

The other challenges were that some of the characteristics could not be determined in the target system, since logistics info was not available. We did create lot of derivation rules to populate some of the characteristics based on Material No, Company Code, Product Hierarchy. It is not possible to derive all the characteristics from the source system since there were performance detoriations. So one other area is also to look at what kind of master data you are replicating especially, customer, material and fields in them like customer hierarchy and product hierarchy.We did have to do real time RFC calls to source system to populate data like Sales order etc, which we could not figure out the right way to update during replication.

So essentially, it is not a straight forward way. You need to be clear on:

1. How the CB COPA is set up in the source system and if there are any changes required before you start the replication

2. Make sure that you can have the cleaned up master data like Customer and material being replicated into the target system as well

3. There are certain scenarios like COGS Split, Actual Costing period end activities, Sales Order Costing which are a bit tricky to handle and would need significant amount of effort with custom development to have the scenario working

You should do at least 1 quarter of recon between source and target to make sure that the replication is working as you are expecting.

Regards

Sanil Bhandari

[former_member587659]

Thanks a lot for the details Sanil! This is really helpful.

Could you also guide if there is a separate toolkit provided in S/4 HANA 1709 which would be needed for the migration from Costing Based COPA in Source to Account based COPA in CFIN? If yes, where can we get some technical documentation on the same?

[sanilbhandari]

Hi

Please refer to the simplification list of S/4HANA 1709. It does not mention of any such tool.

https://help.sap.com/doc/4698ca4ad85a4a24994b2016f366cc77/1709%20000/en-US/SIMPL_OP1709.pdf

Thanks & regards

Sanil Bhandari