Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting
The cost center accounting module has several great reports that can be used to analyze the plan, target and actual costs, broken down by cost elements in a particular period or range of periods. These reports are normally satisfactory to most users due to their flexibility (you can report on one or many cost centers and groups) and detail (you can drill down into each cost element line to find the individual transactions that make up that line) and they can be found in the below menu path:
Accounting -> Controlling -> Cost Center Accounting -> Information System -> Reports for Cost Center Accounting
One disadvantage of these reports though is to do with the options that you have on the selection screen. When you click on the ‘Multiple Selection’ button (the box with a yellow arrow), you will see that you only have the option to select single cost center values or ranges. This means that unlike other reports’ selection screens (see transactions FBL1N, FAGLL03, or S_ALR_87011963 for example) you do not have the option to exclude cost center values from your report selection. One obvious way to do this is to use cost center groups (or ranges) and exclude the relevant cost center(s) from the group. This however, is not a very flexible approach. Cost c enter groups do not allow you to exclude cost centers either, and you would instead need to create ranges in the group which circumvent the cost center(s) you are trying to exclude. Needless to say, this is a cumbersome process and not really flexible for quick and expedient reporting.
A great but underutilized option is to use selection variants. These can be created in transaction KM1V. Enter a variant name and click on the “Create” button. You will then see a number of fields within which you can enter different criteria. Click on the ‘Multiple Selection’ button to the right of the “Cost center” field. You will see the four normal tabs that you can use to include or exclude cost center values or ranges. You can then enter the cost center(s) that you want to exclude in the “Exclude Single Values” tab, click on the ‘Execute’ button and click on the ‘Attributes’ button to name and save the variant.
Note that selection variants can be used for a whole bunch of other purposes by restricting or specifying values in all the other fields that exist in the “Maintain Variant” screen.
When next you go to a cost center report, such as one of the most commonly used ones – transaction S_ALR_87013611; simply enter a period and the selection variant that you created in the “Cost center group” field. For example, if you created a selection variant called “BURDEN”, then enter the value “.BURDEN” as the cost center group. When you execute the report you will see that the cost center(s) that you excluded will not be shown.
You can easily change the selection variant by going back to transaction K M1V, entering the variant name and clicking on the “Change” button. You can then amend the variant accordingly, save it, and re-execute your cost center report containing the selection variant.
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