The CO-PA module usually acts as a "Gross Margin" analysis tool, rather than as a full-blown "Earnings-Before-Interest-and-Taxes" ledger. But, regardless of how your particular site uses it, each CO-PA debit or credit entry will have two — and only two — parts to it:

• The "Who/What/Where," or "Characteristics" part of the entry.

• The "How Much Quantity or Money," or "Key Figures" part of the entry.¹

"Characteristics" vs. "Key Figures"

The most common "Characteristics" that report readers like to have associated with the profit-related (revenue or cost) data in CO-PA include Product #s, Customer #s, Sales Representatives ID #s, and Locations (such as Shipped From and Shipped To cities and countries).

But there can be many other "Who," "What," or "Where" bits of information that should be recorded at the same time as the "How Much" value(s), depending on the kind of revenue or cost that is being updated to CO-PA.

Or, perhaps the opposite business need exists. Perhaps the end users of source transactions that require manual entry of values into Characteristics fields — transactions such as manual postings to CO-PA or "settlement" allocations to CO-PA from the Project Systems module — sometimes populate too many Characteristics.

To help you manage these cases with consistency, the CO-PA configuration can include rules (created and maintained in a "Characteristic Group") that can be enforced during any attempts by end users to update a particular revenue or cost in CO-PA.

I’ve used this feature since the days of R/3 Release 3.1. The navigation path from the latest release (4.6D as of press time) is shown in Figure 1 (next page).

Once you create a "Characteristic Group," you can then assign it to the source transactions in which you want that logic to be always enforced.

Figure 1

The Characteristic Group Navigation Path in R/3 Release 4.6D

Required Entry vs. Blocked Entry

Configuration allows you to express your choice of Characteristics to be "required," and Characteristics to be "blocked." This typically means that it might be a good idea to choose Blocked Entry logic for Characteristics fields for which CO-PA derivation rules already exist, as a way to prevent end users from unintentionally interfering with that derivation. But, ultimately, the choice is yours as to which fields to make required manual entry, and which to protect against manual entry.

For example, let’s pretend that you have warehousing expenses posted to the G/L via a FI journal entry, and that your CO-PA design calls for these expenses to also update CO-PA directly from that FI journal entry. In this case, the FI journal entry end user will be navigating to a special data entry screen, where he or she will have to type in values for one or more CO-PA Characteristics.

You — as the CO-PA designer — want to be sure that Accounting personnel responsible for posting the entry always populate two specific product-related Characteristics, and never the Customer and other organizational Characteristics.

To solve this issue, you create a Characteristic Group that requires population of the two product-related Characteristics, and which blocks all the other Characteristics. (Other Characteristics that are part of your Derivation Rules will still be automatically populated, such as Company Code and site-specific, product-related Characteristics, such as Product Hierarchy — they just cannot be populated manually, by the end user.)

Once you then assign the Characteristic Group to the desired transaction for which it should be used (or to the CO-PA "Record Type" itself, making it used for all transactions that post to CO-PA with that record type), the Characteristic Group becomes active.

Summary

The CO-PA "Characteristic Group" functionality offers a useful way to establish consistency in regards to which Characteristics (i.e., Who/What/Where fields) do and do not get populated from each kind of Revenue and Cost source transaction that updates your particular CO-PA system.

In addition to an obvious benefit of making the data more consistent — and thus easier to interpret in the reports — the consistency also helps out in terms of overall CO-PA response speeds.

For more details about CO-PA functionality, download a CO-PA performance tips white paper at the bottom of this article.