I have been approached a few times with the following questions related to how to track changes that have been applied to the expenses of customer projects:
- How can I see who changed sales order item assignments or quantities/amounts in “Edit Time and Expenses”
- How can I see when these changes were done?
- How can I see who changed assignment rules for project expenses and applied the changed rules?
- What changes were applied to project expenses when creating a project invoice request.
The answer to all these questions is:Create a data source and an analytics report with PDI means.
Done!
In the remainder of this blog I will explain:
- How to create data source “PIRChangeDocs”
- How to set up analytics report “PIR Change Docs”
- How to interpret the data of “PIR Change Docs”
1. How to create data source “PIRChangeDocs”
In the SAP Cloud Application Studio, add a data source to your solution. Have a look at the following picture that shows all relevant information for creating the data source:
In the next step, add the necessary fields to the data source. Since the data source view gets quite lengthy when expanded, have a look at the reference fields tab from which you can conclude which fields to mark. Don’t forget to fill the referenced data sources and to provide one transformation rule.
You don’t have to make any changes on the Aggregations tab.
2. How to set up analytics report “PIR Change Docs”
Create a new report for the data source “PIRChangeDocs” in the SAP Cloud Application Studio.
The following pictures will guide you through the creation process:
Now that the report is created, create a view
3. How to interpret the data of “PIR Change Docs”
The report for the test project I created in one of our reference systems now looks like this:
The report is not an exact audit trace or a change document, but it contains a new record (denoted by: ID / Item ID) as soon as a change with respect to the key figures amount, quantity, and total calculated amount has been done.
Explanation of selection criteria
- Project
- The ID of the customer project for which you would like to see the “change documents”.
Explanation of Characteristics
- Expense Document Type
- Type of business document that is project-accounted:
- Employee Time Calendar, Expense Report, (Supplier) Invoice, Goods an Activity Confirmation, Goods and Services Receipt
- Expense Date
- The date for which the expense was recorded
- Expense Document
- The ID of the business document that is project-accounted
- Expense Task
- The project task ID entered in the expense document
- ID / Item ID
- The “change document” ID / item ID
- Invoice Task
- The project task ID to which the revenue is attributed
- Please note: the full accounting information also contains SO / SO Item
- SO / SO Item
- The ID of the sales order / sales order item to which the revenue is attributed
- Please note: the full accounting information also contains a project task
- Cancelled
- When Cancelled = ‘X’, the “change document” has been cancelled and is not relevant any more.
- Created On / Created By; Changed On / Changed By
- Refers to the creation / change date / person of the “change document”
- NTBI
- This expense is “not to be invoiced”, thus written-off
- Excess Ind.
- When Excess Ind. = ‘X’, the expense is higher than originally recorded
- Customer Invoice / Customer Invoice Item
- Once an expense is contained in a released invoice, this information will be provided in the “change document” as well.
- This leads to an update of the existing record.
Explanation of key figures
- Quantity
- The (part of the) quantity of the expense that you want to invoice, defer, write off
- Amount
- The (part of the) amount that you want to invoice, defer, write off
- Total Calculated Amount
- The quantity or amount valuated at sales prices of the respective SO item
- Please note: This amount is ONLY filled if the related sales order item has a “time and material” item type. For the time being, the amount is not calculatedif the expense is related to fixed price sales order item.
Please note that information that you have in one line in “not invoiced expenses” e.g. has been broken down to several lines in this report:
Let’s assume you have a time recording of 8 hours. You write off 2 hours, defer 1 hour and want to invoice 5 hours.
Then, you would find the following lines in the report assuming that the sales price for an hour is 100 USD:
- Line 1
Quantity = 5 hours,
Amount = 0,
Total Calculated Amount = 500 USD - Line 2
Quantity = 2 hours,
Amount = 0,
Total Calculated Amount = 200 USD
NTBI = ‘X’ - Line 3
Quantity = 1 hours,
Amount = 0,
Total Calculated Amount = 100 USD
Explanation of a few use cases:
The example consists of the following sales order 5532 that is linked to the tasks of project CPSO97.
- ID 548-1 (Created 11:56)
Here, you can see that the time recording was done by Peter Sellers with respect to task CPSO97-3. Since 5532/30 is a fixed price SO item, the Total Calculated Amount is zero. - ID 548-2 (Created 16:05)
Obviously I changed the sales order item assignment for that time recording at 16:05. This also resulted in ID 548-1 being cancelled. The Total Calculated Amount is now 300 USD, since the related SO item 5532-10 has a list price of 300 USD per hour. Since the task associated with SO item 5532-10 is CPSO97-1, the Invoice Task is CPSO97-1 whichis not the task to which the expense was originally assigned.
At 16:33, an update was provided in order to update the record with the information that this very expense has now been included in customer invoice 1INV-2-2016.
- ID 552-1 (Created 11.57)
Tonia Gartner recorded 1.5 hours to CPSO97-1. Since SO item 10 has a list price of 300 USD per hour, the Total Calculated Amount is 450 USD.
- ID 552-2 (Created 14:31)
I changed the SO item assignment for that expense from 5532-10 to 5532-20. This lead to the cancellation of 552-1 and the Change date/time being different from the creation date/time.
- ID 552-3/4 (Created 16:26)
In a next step, 0,5 h of the 1.5 hours were written off and 1 h remain to be invoiced. The Total Calculated Amounts were adjustedaccordingly. ID 552-3 was updated at 16:33 with the Customer Invoice information.
- ID 558-1 (Created 12:42)
The 200 USD are part of an expense report that was account-assigned to CPSO97 / 5532-40. All expense report items and the (supplier) invoice 555-1 were invoice via the same invoice item. Then, in the customer invoice itself, I reduced the list price from the real value to 800 USD. Thus, when updating the “change documents” with the Customer Invoice information, the system cancelled, 558-1 and created 558-2 at 16:33 together with an adjusted Total Calculated Amount. Thus, when you see the line for 558-2 the key figures have to be interpreted in a way that the original 200 USD of the expense report (Amount) were now invoice at a lesser amount of 186,26 USD.
4. Summary
There are quite a few possibilities how to use this report.
You could,
- Use filtering by Created On or Changed On in order to see which changes were done before or after a certain point in time.
- Arrange the characteristics in a way more meaningful to you
- Export the report to Excel and then do a bit of color-coding here and there to see the interesting changes easier.
- …
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