Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting
A question that has been posed to me a few times is how one makes profit center adjustments when New G/L has been activated. For example when certain postings have been made to an incorrect profit center and you want to post it to the correct profit center; or when the system cannot find the profit center from a cost object (or other derivation methods) and it assigns the document to the dummy profit center which you now want to clear out to the correct profit center. With classic G/L this was done by using transaction 9KE0. This transaction was normally used when you did not want the G/L to be impacted (and hence not use a journal entry) but only profit center accounting.
However, with the advent of the New General Ledger, transaction 9KE0 is no longer relevant as it was part of “classic” EC-PCA and can only be used when the ‘profit center accounting’ component is activated in the controlling area. We all know (or should know) now that with New G/L you do not need to activate profit center accounting in the controlling area, but instead you should assign the profit center scenario to the relevant ledgers in General Ledger Accounting. The idea is that profit center accounting should now be part of FI and not CO. In fact according to SAPNote 826357, if you previously used classic profit center accounting but were now on New G/L, you can run both classic and new profit center accounting in parallel for a certain period, but you should eventually switch off classic profit center accounting. This expected to minimize data volumes and reduce the time and effort of performin g month end tasks which are no longer required with New G/L. This however, means that you can no longer use transaction 9KE0 and would need to find another way of making PCA adjustments.
If you check the SAP Help on this topic, you will see that they suggest that you use an assessment or distribution to move the values from a dummy/default profit center to the correct profit center. Personally, I think this is a little overkill for something that could be easily fixed by a simple two-line transaction (such as with 9KE0). Of course, you also have the new ‘profit center reorganization’ tool which can amend errors made to incorrect profit center assignments. Once again, I think this is too complex a solution if the error requires a simple reposting.
My recommendation to those who ask is to simply use the G/L posting transaction FB50. This is not always easily accepted by users, as they feel that SAP should help you to minimize the number of journals you should make. Also, the fact that the postings will show up in the G/L (when it should only be a profit center reposting) make people question this solution as well. Here is my argument:
Since profit centers are now part of the general ledger, it makes sense that a profit center adjustment should use the same transaction as a general ledger adjustment; With the real-time FI/CO integration functionality (which is part of new G/L) every CO related posting that involves two different profit centers will create a journal anyway. If you didn’t know this, go run a query (FAGLL03) on the FICO reconciliation account (which you can find in transaction OK17 and click on “Display Account Determination”) and you will see that several postings are made here which are basically documents that involve different cost object assignments. The balance of this account is always zero because there is no G/L impact. You can therefore create an account (in the same range as this reconciliation account) and use it as the debit and credit account for any PCA adjustment postings in transaction FB50.
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