Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting
Ever since profit center accounting has been integrated with the SAP General Ledger, there has been some confusion about which classic PCA transactions can still be used. One of the transactions that can be used in both classic and New G/L PCA is the one profit center substitutions 0KEM. For those of you that never used this transaction (even with classic PCA), it is a very useful way of deriving a profit center in cases where more specific requirements need to be met.
Here is a typical example of where you may want to use this functionality: You want to derive the profit center from the Division that the product is sold from. It is not possible to enter different profit centers in the material master by division (only by Plant, Sales Organization and Distribution Channel), so you will need to derive the profit center from the Division that is entered in the sales order.
To do this, you need to go to transaction 0KEM and click on the button “Create Substitution”. You can then give the substitution a name and description and click on the “Create Step” button. Check the box for the table “PCASUB” and the field PRCTR and press the ‘Enter’ key. A pop-up box will appear asking you to enter the substitution method. In our example we will use the “Constant” method, however you have the option of using a user exit or a field to field assignment (where you substitute a field with the values of another field). When you have selected the “Constan t” method, you can press the ‘Enter’ key and, on the left –part of the screen, double-click on the “Prerequisite” icon. This will open up an editable area in the top-right part of the screen. In the ‘List of Structures’ section of the screen, double-click on “Structure PCASUB” and in the ensuing screen double-click on the technical name “PCASUB-SPAR2”(Division in Header). You will see this technical name appear in the Prerequisite entry screen. You can then enter the equal sign “=” and enter a Division that you want the profit center to be derived from. You can then double-click on the “Substitution” icon in the left-part of the screen which will allow you to enter the relevant profit center in the ‘Constant value’ field in the right-part of the screen. You can then create different mappings of Divisions to Profit Centers by creating new Steps (clicking on the “Insert Step” button) and repeating the process above for each step.
When the process is complete you can save the substitution by clicking on the “Save” button. You can then activate the substitution by going to transaction 0KEL and clicking on the “New Entries” button and then entering the relevant Controlling Area, Substitution and an activation status of “1”. You can then save your entries.
Note that the profit center derived from this substitution supersedes the one derived from the document splitting functionality of the New General Ledger. For that reason it is important that you make this substitution only in cases that you know that document splitting will not produce the correct profit center .
You can find more information about Profit Center Accounting and the SAP General Ledger by attending my live Q&A forum:
Also, for more infrormation 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.