Investment Planning
Asset accounting and depreciation simulation with SAP and Excel
Why do we need investment planning?
Let’s assume that a company has to make a spontaneous investment. Due to the short notice of this acquisition, is not included in the cost center planning, which means that the planned/actual comparison for this month shows a negative deviation compared to the forecast value. Investment planning is therefore an important aspect of business planning. The aim is to collect the individual investment ideas of the various organizational units and evaluate them in terms of their economic viability.
Ultimately, you resort to depreciation to handle this. This means that the new investment is not included as a cost in the planned/actual comparison for a particular month, but recorded under depreciation. The depreciation period for the investment is also defined here.
Challenges of detailed planning in SAP
If you now want to carry out long-term planning for the entire company, you must pay attention to the fact that there may be many depreciations within the company running in parallel and overlapping. This is exactly why we have investment planning. A special list of existing assets as well as the planned depreciation is created, and the depreciation is calculated in each case. The detailed lists of depreciations are necessary in order to ultimately carry out complete and comprehensible investment planning.
SAP includes the “Asset Accounting” module, which contains all assets, their useful life and the depreciation calculation. The associated depreciation simulation (transaction AR18 or RASIMU02) shows which assets are already running for different cost centers and the resulting depreciation values for specific periods. The SAP transaction thus calculates the future depreciation values (= depreciation simulation) from the existing assets (such as machines). In order to transfer this detailed calculation to an overall investment plan, the individual depreciation values have to be exported, aggregated in Excel and then posted in SAP. This process requires considerable time and often results in transfer errors.
Investment planning with the Allevo Excel-SAP integration
Allevo — the Excel application which is integrated into SAP — enables you to perform a detailed calculation and investment planning directly in your SAP system. You can run the depreciation simulation in SAP once before the planning stage, and you will see a list of all depreciation simulations for each cost center or each order on the Allevo Excel interface. You can now check these and adjust them as necessary. In the next step, the calculated depreciation costs can then be included in the relevant cost type and posted in SAP in a straightforward and automated procedure — without having to perform a separate calculation outside of SAP.
Allevo enables you to design your investment planning individually, since the Excel list is tailored specifically to your needs. You can list investments, set prices as well as define the depreciation period or when depreciation will start, for example. At the end, you obtain a total of any number of capital goods that are saved directly in SAP. Unlike the SAP standard system, Allevo allows you to store your detailed lists in your SAP system as planned and even to open and edit the list again later (for example, to make changes to the depreciation period, create or remove investments).
The depreciation simulations are therefore taken straight from SAP, while you plan the new investments at the same time in a simple and straightforward process. The data and information can be read at any time. The Reporting function enables planning managers to view the current status with planned and actual data for investment planning without having to request it again decentrally. Excel is the only user interface — no new or additional software needs to be implemented.
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You would like to get to know our software solutions without obligation and free of charge? Then get to know it in a live online demo. Our specialists will answer your individual questions and provide insights into our SAP Excel integration.
The advantages of investment planning with Allevo
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Excel integration into your SAP system
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No duplicate data maintenance and decentralized planning
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Automatic transfer and posting of inventory depreciation
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Individual planning of new assets
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Decentralized and centralized adjustment of the detailed list
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Secure data storage directly in SAP
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Excel user interface
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Automatic calculation of the depreciation
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Can be expanded, e.g. to include computation of interest
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Reporting option from your own SAP system
Allevo at Energie Wasser Bern
"The most important thing for me is the integration of Allevo in SAP, where we can use current master and transaction data from SAP. This makes it possible to write the plan data in SAP without media breaks." – Stephan Mücher, Controlling Manager
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