How to allocate actual labor cost details to Projects or grants in PSM

[Former Member]

We have been using Activity type prices to allocate costs to projects. Activity type prices are based actual costs, but agregated into an average. More and more Grants and US federal accounting requirements are causing our business users to go back and manually recalculate actual labor costs in spreadsheets with details of what makes up the costs. Some grants on't allow certain benefits or local taxes for instance, so each employer cost must be detailed for the Grant billing, or justified to allocate costs to Capital Projects. Public Sector functionality is seriously needed to transfer the actual costs, possibly at the wage type level to projects and Grants. Has anyone found a solution to this issue yet? I see that ASUG discussions on this topic have been posted for several years without resolutions.

[matthew_hanson]

Although this is a very old post, it might be helpful for others to know how I've handled this in the past.

We addressed this first by creating an activity type for each employee and assigning the actual wage for that employee. After the labor hours were transfered to CO we ran a custom program that read the actual posting from the transfer to CO and created another FI posting based on percentages of labor which posted our benefit and overhead expenses using a JV transaction. However, the problem we ran into was the changes to pay rates in the middle of the month. So to address this, we used a standard user exit that updated the activity rate with the basic pay infotype when data was entered into CAT2.

So far the program has worked perfectly and save our grant accountants countless hours of time separating those cost for the grant billings.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Actual activity price calculation, actual activity cost calculation and actual activity price calculation with cost component split (which gives you the details of what makes up the cost) are all standard CO functionality. In a manufacturing environment, people do these things all the time. You may want to look it up on CO forum. Below is a link to SAP documentation:

http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_06/helpdata/EN/66/bc740043c211d182b30000e829fbfe/frameset.htm

Of course, you will still need to check whether the methods used in SAP meet the federal requirements.

Regards,

Ming