SAP Profit Center Determination in Sales Order

Profit center determination happens in SAP automatically based on values maintained in master data. SAP also offers options to customize determination of profit centers with substitutions.

Profit center is an organizational unit in SAP that reflects a management-oriented structure of a company for the purpose of profits and costs reporting. When a new sales order is created, SAP system automatically determines a profit centre for each material (product or service) in the order. Derivation of profit centers in sales orders is based on master data:

1. The system checks the delivery plant for a sales order item.
2. Next, it retrieves master data of a material for that delivery plant.
3. After that, it populates the profit center maintained in the material master data (‘Sales: General/Plan Data’ view).
4. Profit center from the material master data will be copied in the sales order item.

SAP Profit Center Substitution in Sales Order

If you require additional control and customization of how SAP determines profit centers in sales orders, you can use the substitution functionality of the Controlling (CO) module. Substitutions can be used to replace profit centers derived from material master data (see above) with different profit centers based on custom rules and prerequisites.

Transactions

You can access the configuration for the profit centers substitution from SPRO transaction (path: Controlling > Profit Center Accounting > Assignments of Account Assignment Objects to Profit Centers > Sales Orders > Sales Order Substitution).

Also, it is possible to use the following transactions to access the configuration directly:

• 0KEM – Define Substitution Rules
• 0KEL – Assign Substitution Rules

Configuration Steps

There are a few steps that are required to set up substitution of profit centers in sales orders:

1. First, it is necessary to create a substitution.
2. Next, we need to add a step into the substitution. A substitution can include multiple steps.
3. For each step, we need to define Prerequisites and Substitutions:
   1. Prerequisites are checked before execution of a step. Each step will be conditionally executed by SAP only if the prerequisites are met.
   2. Substitution – this is the actual substitution that SAP will do. For example, it can say that profit center should be substituted with a constant value. However, it is also possible to get the new profit center from a user exit.

Substitution Rules

If necessary, you can also create Rules to store and re-use the logical conditions for substitutions. The same rule can be used in multiple steps of a substitution. This way, you will not have to repeat the same condition logic in each step but can simply assign a rule that was created earlier.

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