S4 HANA Vs ECC - COPA

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The author describes issues with account-based COPA reporting when there are cost objects like service orders that revenue and costs are initially assigned to before being settled. Specifically, important profitability characteristics like customer and material are not available at the time of initial posting. The new 'Attributed Profitability Segments' functionality aims to address this by deriving profitability segments even when there is another cost object assignment.

The author describes that with account-based COPA in older releases, important profitability characteristics like customer and material were not available at the time of initial revenue and cost postings if these were initially assigned to a cost object like a service order that was later settled. This meant the data was incomplete for standard COPA reports.

The new 'Attributed Profitability Segments' functionality derives 'statistical' profitability segments at the time of initial posting even if there is another cost object assignment. This allows profitability characteristics to be available directly at posting time for improved reporting.

In S/4HANA 1610 a new functionality called ‘Attributed Profitability Segments’ is introduced.

It is now
possible to derive a (statistical) profitability segment when there is another real CO object with a
settlement rule to COPA.

I was hoping that this would fix some occurring issues with Account Based COPA in S/4HANA.
Below, I will explain the scenario I have been dealing with in my example with a revenue bearing
time & material service order which is billed with a debit memo. The debit memo request has an
account assignment to the service order. The service order has an settlement rule to COPA. In this
example I use an S/4HANA Finance 1503 environment.

In my second example I will show you how the Attributed Profitability Segment in S/4HANA 1610
works. See the difference yourself and decide if you can benefit from this new enhancement.

Current issues in Account Based Profitability Analysis


Here I will show you a time & material service order scenario and the reporting issues in Account
Based COPA without having attributed profitability segments.
As you can see in the settlement rule, the order will be settled to COPA:
The Debit Memo request is created with DP90:

In the account assignment in the sales order line items you can see the assignment to the service
order and no assignment to a Profitability Segment.

This means that you cannot report on the Revenu in Profitablity Analsyis untill the Service Order is
settled. Even then, you will see the revenue on the settlement cost elements, not on the original
revenue cost element.

Reporting
Let’s have a look on the data of this Invoice and service order in the ACDOCA table.

The top rows in the blue rectangular are the actual postings on the service order (e.g. Revenue
Accounts). The others are postings resulting from the settlement of service order (settlement cost
elements). In this example I have my COPA characteristic Ship to Party and Ship to Country. As you
can see these fields are not derived during the daily postings. They are only derived when the
service order is settled to COPA.

The result is that I don’t have my COPA characteristics on my revenue GL accounts. Reporting in
COPA with the use of standard ACDOCA reports and KPI Fiori tiles will result in incomplete figures
in these cases.

Have a look at the Actual Revenue KPI tiles in Fiori which come with SAP Smart Business as part of
Embedded Analytics. The Revenue KPI app is based on Account Based COPA, thus Cost Elements
and corresponding profitability characteristics. In this current scenario the profitability characteristics
are not assigned to the revenue accounts. What you will see is this:
The same issues applies on the new ACDOCA report ‘Market Segment Actuals’:

The only way to overcome this is building your own reports in HANA Live and making reports in one
of the SAP Business Object tools available (Lumira, Webi or Analysis for Office). Similar to what I
have done for my T&M service order profitability in Analysis for Office:

Using the attributed Profitability Segments in S/4HANA


1610 
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the new functionality called ‘Attributed Profitability
Segments’ has been introduced. If there is a real account assignment to one of the objects below,
the system can derive “statistical” (or attributed) COPA segments for reporting purpose:

 Cost Center
 Internal Order
 Project
 Sales Order
 Production Order
Unfortunately the service order is not included in this list as object. Thus a direct solution for my
scenario explained above has not been provided yet by SAP. I hope the service order will be
supported soon as receiving CO object.

However let’s see how this new functionality works with a supported object, the internal order.
Technically it’s the same issue we are solving, but instead of the service order we use an internal
order as account assignment. In the configuration I have activated the Attributed Profitability
Segment for internal Orders only for postings on P&L accounts. As mentioned at the beginning of my
post, I will use a S/4HANA 1610 environment in this example.

The below internal order has an settlement rule to COPA.


I create a sales order with assignment to the above internal order in the line item. As you can see
there is no assignment to COPA.

Final posting of the invoice:

After posting the invoice you will see the attributed segment in the revenue line item in the ACDOCA
table.
The real CO account assignment can be found in field Object Type (ACCTASY) which is the Internal
Order in this case. As you can see the COPA characteristics like the Material, Customer, Material
Group, Customer Group and Ship to Party are derived as well!

I see huge benefits in this new functionality for reporting purposes since profitability characteristics
are derived directly at the moment of posting even if there is another CO assignment. For me it was
a long awaited functionality, however I’m very disappointed that it isn’t working yet in scenarios were
the service orders is the receiving cost object. I have addressed this to SAP and waiting for a reply.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this and I wonder if you have experienced similar issues with CO
objects as well? If you have other thoughts or questions related to this subject, please don’t hesitate
to leave a comment. If there are any other S/4HANA related cases you would like to see, just let me
know and perhaps I can write a future post on the topic.

Update September 2017: SAP has released an OSS note to enable the attributed Profitability
Segment functionality for Service and Maintenance Orders. By default this is not enabled in the
releases S/4 HANA Finance 1605, S/4 HANA OP 1610 and 1709.
After implementing the following OSS note this will be enabled:

2497666 – S/4 HANA Finance: Attributed profitability segments for service and maintenance orders

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