Configuring SAP® ERP Financial and Controlling

Costing-Based vs. Account-Based CO-PA

CO-PA can capture and hold data in two ways—costing based and account based. The operating concern, the central tenet of CO-PA, is the structure that you define to hold data for CO-PA and to use as the basis for reports. An operating concern can use costing-based, account-based, or both forms of CO-PA simultaneously. Both forms use characteristics to store data about the information that is updated in CO-PA. Characteristics include such aspects as customer, sales office, sales group, material number, strategic business unit, company code, profit center, sales employee, controlling area, product hierarchy, and so on. We’ll cover these characteristics in more detail in the “Creating Characteristics” section ...