Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting
Additive costs are extra costs that are added to a material’s cost estimate which are not calculated through the system. They are used in addition to the costs that are calculated automatically by the system using BOMs, routings, special procurement keys and other methods. A typical example of when you would use additive costs is when you have a warehouse that products are shipped to from your plant. The transportation costs for shipping the products should be added to the cost of the product at the warehouse. For example, if the cost of the product at the plant is $1 per lb and the transportation cost to get the product to the warehouse is $.10 per lb, the standard cost at the warehouse should be $1.10 per lb.
The transaction to enter additive costs is CK74N. You enter the material, plant and costing variant in the relevant fields and then hit the ‘Enter’ key. You then enter the “Costing From”, “Costing Due” and “Valuation” dates and hit the ‘Enter’ key again. The screen “Create Unit Cost Estimate – List Screen” then appears. Here you enter the values as follows:
Field | Explanation |
Item Category | Enter the value “V – Variable Item” |
Quantity | Quantity to be multiplied by the unitcost |
Unit of Measure | Unit of Measure that the cost is based on |
Description | Description of the type of additive cost |
Price | The unit cost of the to be added |
Cost Element | The secondary cost element that will be used to update the cost estimate |
When you save the entries the cost will be added to the cost estimate of the product when it is calculated.
The problem with additive costs is that you can only enter them for a single material at a time. This could be quite cumbersome if you have several materials which need to have additive costs entered (which is normally the case). There is currently no standard program to update additive costs on a mass basis, so you have the options of either creating a custom program or creating an LSMW object. I prefer the latter as it does not require the assistance of a programmer.
You should create the LSMW using the Batch Input recording method. The transaction the recording should be based on should be CK74. The new additive costs transaction CK74N does not seem to work as well. Most of the generic steps needed to create this LSMW can be learned by reading the documentation on the SAP Help site. I will however, detail the fields that need to be specified in the “Maintain Source Fields” step. They are as follows:
Field | Description |
KLVAR | Costing Variant |
MATNR | Material Number |
WERKS | Plant |
TVERS | Costing Version |
KADAT | Costing Date From |
BIDAT | Costing Date To |
BWDAT | Valuation Date |
LST_SETNR | Unit Costing Item Number |
TYPPS_01 | Item Category |
MENGE_01 | Quantity |
LTEXT_01 | Description |
LPREIS_01 | Price |
LPEINH_01 | Price Unit |
KSTAR_01 | Cost Element |
One thing to note is that if you entered a “Costing Date To” value of 12/31/9999 (which is typical when cost estimates are created), the next time you execute the LSMW the system will give you a message saying that a cost estimate already exists and will ask if you want to overwrite this. For that reason the LSMW’s batch input session will not be able to run in the background unless you confirm the message for each material (which could be a painstaking exercise). To avoid this, you may need to create a different LSMW for changing additive costs which is based on transaction CK75.
For more information on how to optimize your SAP Financials landscape, I've put together my top tips in the book 100 Things You Should Know About Financial Accounting with SAP which is published by SAP Press.