Direct Posting from Financial Accounting

Direct posting enables you to post direct costs, revenue, and sales deductions to profitability segments. Examples of this include licensing fees for purchased merchandise, special direct costs from sales, such as transportation insurance for a certain shipment, cost and revenues for services, or invoices received for a marketing campaign.

You assign the values to a profitability segment directly in the Financial Accounting (FI) posting transaction. There, you can call up a special assignment dialog box for each posting line by clicking the Prof. segment field.

In this dialog box the system displays the characteristics that you can choose from the operating concern you are working in. To define the structure of the dialog window, you can create a "characteristic group" for the RFBU activity in Customizing. The characteristic group defines which characteristics are displayed for selection.

For direct postings in Financial Accounting, all the assignments of values and quantities to the value fields in costing-based Controlling Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) are defined in the PA transfer structure, FI, which you maintain in Customizing.

In account-based CO-PA, the data is posted in the same cost or revenue element.

If your system allows dual postings to both a profitability segment and a cost center, the real posting always goes to the profitability segment. The cost center is posted only for statistical purposes.

Automatic Account Assignment

Automatic postings, such as those generated in Materials Management, can be passed on to Profitability Analysis using automatic PA assignment functions. The documents are updated in CO-PA for the profitability segment found on the basis of characteristic information in the corresponding Financial Accounting document.

This function should be used only in special cases for specific accounts and for representing rare business transactions. The transactions for which it is prudent to define an automatic PA assignment include the activities to:

• Transfer the price differences that are posted in the Purchasing application component due to the price changes in an invoice.
• Transfer the income or expenses that arise through the revaluation of material inventories.
• Transfer inventory differences.

Remember that the cost or revenue elements that receive automatic postings are assigned to the value fields in the costing-based CO-PA in the PA transfer structure, FI, which you maintain in Customizing.