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This blog post is the third part of a blog post series with the intent to serve as a guide towards success with allocations in the SAP Analytics Cloud. It is complementary to the Webinar “Getting the Most out of Allocations with the SAP Analytics Cloud”.
To view the introduction with an overview of SAP Analytics Cloud allocations and other blog posts in the series, please click here.
Scenario: Your IT Department has been collecting costs for the entire organization since the beginning of the year. Now that quarter 1 is coming to a close, you want to allocate the IT costs to the other departments, based on headcount. When you allocate the costs, the cost center owners want to be able to see which costs they incurred as a result of the allocation by using the "Allocs" audit trail and posting the results to a specific account.
Allocation Process:
We can create an allocation process to carry out this allocation. An allocation process consists of two steps: Allocation Step and Allocation Rule.
Create an Allocation Step
Create an allocation step to and from the Entity dimension, and add Audit as the overwrite dimension and as a target dimension. Because we want to post the results to a specific account, we can specify the target account in the "Booking Account" field. In our example, we have specified the "Allocation in" account.
We are filtering on our expense accounts in this example.
Allocation Rule:
Once we create the allocation step, we can add the members to the allocation rule. For this rule, we have specified the Cost Collector (our IT department) as the source entity (sender), Input by user as the Overwrite dimension, headcount as the driver, the parent node All Portfolios as the target entities (receiver), and the Allocations Audit.
This means the allocation will only run on records with an "input by User" audit trail, and the results will be posted to the "Allocations" audit trail.
We don't need to specify the account it will post to here since we specified the booking account in the Allocation step.
Source Data:
On our source data, we will focus on the total expenses for January - we want to allocate out $112,500. We are focusing on both EXP1 and EXP 5 because the results will be posted to one booking account.
HC Data:
When the system runs the allocation, it will calculate the amounts each Entity receives based on the data stored against headcount data. When we use the overwrite dimension, the system will read the driver values based on the target driver data. In our example, if we focus on January, P1_L for the Allocs audit trail will receive 30% of the costs incurred on the Cost Collector (30/100=30%).
Run Allocation:
We run the allocation using the "Execute Allocation Process" button in the story menu:
Results:
Once we run the allocation, we can check the results. If we focus on P1_L for January, we can see that 30% of $112,500 was allocated correctly to the Allocation in account. Please see calculation below.
Calculation:
Source amount for Cost Collector/Input/Jan/EXPENSE: $112,500
Driver: P1 Large/Allocs/HC: 30/100= 0.3
$112,500 *0.3 = $33,750 for P1 Large for Jan in ALLOCS_IN Account
To view the introduction with an overview of SAP Analytics Cloud allocations and other blog posts in the series, please click here.
Scenario: Your IT Department has been collecting costs for the entire organization since the beginning of the year. Now that quarter 1 is coming to a close, you want to allocate the IT costs to the other departments, based on headcount. When you allocate the costs, the cost center owners want to be able to see which costs they incurred as a result of the allocation by using the "Allocs" audit trail and posting the results to a specific account.
Allocation Process:
We can create an allocation process to carry out this allocation. An allocation process consists of two steps: Allocation Step and Allocation Rule.
Create an Allocation Step
Create an allocation step to and from the Entity dimension, and add Audit as the overwrite dimension and as a target dimension. Because we want to post the results to a specific account, we can specify the target account in the "Booking Account" field. In our example, we have specified the "Allocation in" account.
We are filtering on our expense accounts in this example.
Allocation Rule:
Once we create the allocation step, we can add the members to the allocation rule. For this rule, we have specified the Cost Collector (our IT department) as the source entity (sender), Input by user as the Overwrite dimension, headcount as the driver, the parent node All Portfolios as the target entities (receiver), and the Allocations Audit.
This means the allocation will only run on records with an "input by User" audit trail, and the results will be posted to the "Allocations" audit trail.
We don't need to specify the account it will post to here since we specified the booking account in the Allocation step.
Source Data:
On our source data, we will focus on the total expenses for January - we want to allocate out $112,500. We are focusing on both EXP1 and EXP 5 because the results will be posted to one booking account.
HC Data:
When the system runs the allocation, it will calculate the amounts each Entity receives based on the data stored against headcount data. When we use the overwrite dimension, the system will read the driver values based on the target driver data. In our example, if we focus on January, P1_L for the Allocs audit trail will receive 30% of the costs incurred on the Cost Collector (30/100=30%).
Run Allocation:
We run the allocation using the "Execute Allocation Process" button in the story menu:
Results:
Once we run the allocation, we can check the results. If we focus on P1_L for January, we can see that 30% of $112,500 was allocated correctly to the Allocation in account. Please see calculation below.
Calculation:
Source amount for Cost Collector/Input/Jan/EXPENSE: $112,500
Driver: P1 Large/Allocs/HC: 30/100= 0.3
$112,500 *0.3 = $33,750 for P1 Large for Jan in ALLOCS_IN Account
