Exchange rates for Investment Management and Project Overall and Annual Budgets

I have been supporting the IM and PS modules for a lot of years, but recently came across something new to me, so I thought I would share it. I received a call from the IM Planner from our Denver office saying that they were trying to return budget in IM52 that was wrongly distributed to a USD project. They were able to return all the USD budget from the project, however there was still Controlling Area currency budget remaining. The Controlling Area currency of the Client is CAD. When they tried to return the CAD budget, the system would not allow it – they received an error message saying that USD budget was already zero.

My investigation determined that the primary cause of this was due to the fact that Exchange rate type “P” (used for planning & budgeting) had not been updated on January 1st of the current year.

How did I come to the conclusion that the P rate was the culprit?I ran a CJi8 budget line item report and selected the Overall Values checkbox on the selection screen. When the results were returned, I changed the Layout to include Exchange Rate Type and Annual or Overall values. This showed me that the Overall Budget was using exchange rate type “P” and Annual Values were using exchange rate type “M”.

Meaning of the Annual/Overall Column in the following report screenshot:Flag for annual values (" ") and overall values ("X")

I was surprised to see that SAP was using exchange rate type M for budget, so I searched OSS and found note 138125 which explained that for budgeting and budget distribution:

The exchange rate type and the value date from the budget profile are used for currency translation of the overall values (the client had this set to exchange rate type P)

The exchange rate type and the value date from the fiscal-year parameters of plan version 0 are used for currency translation of the annual values (the client had this set to exchange rate type M – it was set to M so that planning reports that show order planning (which uses version 0) and commitments which are calculated using exchange rate type M, would show the same value. The Client did not specify a value date in the fiscal-year parameters of plan version 0, therefore the annual budget was using the rate for exchange rate type M as of January 1st of the current year (rather than the current period) – this was all fine – or at least it would have been if the Client’s Treasury department had updated the P rate on January 1st of the current year, as per standard SAP best practice. Had they done so, the P rate and the M rate would have been identical on January 1st of the current year, and Overall and Annual budget would have been calculated at the same rate, and there would not have been any issues in IM52 when trying to return USD or CAD budget.

In order to fix the issue after the fact, the first thing I did was to get Treasury to update exchange rate type P with a “valid from” date of January 1 of the current year, and with the same “exchange rate” as exchange rate type M on January 1st of the current year. I also had them add this as a critical step for January 1st each year.

Test Run IMCRC3 in a Non-Production Environment:The next step was to run program IMCRC3 – Currency Recalculation of Plan/Budget for Projects, however since I had never used this program before, I wanted to test the scenario in a non-production system first. Following is how I recreated the scenario in our DEV system:I created project 09-00015 and assigned the level 1 WBS to Appropriation Request 1002222.Using tcode OB08 I changed table TCURR “P” rate 2010/01/01 value to that of the 2008 value, to represent PRD issue. This screen shot also shows the M rate as of Jan 1 2010 – these are the P and M rates in PR1 at the time project 09-00535 was budgeted.

Next I pushed budget to project 09-00015 in DEV, using Tcode IM52. Note the differences in the Current budget column which is Co Area Currency – Overall is using exchange rate type P and calculates $1000 USD as $1200 CAD whereas the Annual value is using the M rate and calculates the $1000 for 2010 as $1046 CAD.

Tcode CJi8 - Budget Line item report verifying exchange rate type P is used for Overall and exchange rate type M is used for annual budget:

Next I changed the P rate for 2010/01/01 back to what it is now updated to in PRD, which is the same as the M rate on 2010/01/01.

I then went into Tcode IM52 and supplemented the budget for our test project 09-00015. Note that the current budget prior to me supplementing the $1000 Annual and $1000 Overall, looked like the screen shot on page 2 – Overall was $1200 and Annual was $1046. However now the P rate is the same as the M rate – both are 1.04660, so an additional $1046 CAD is added to the Overall and Annual amounts in the Current budget column. Now we have a similar instance to our PRD issue. The Overall Co Area Curr current budget amount is made up of 2 different exchange rates.

I set the view in IM52 to object currency and returned the entire $2000 USD Annual and Overall and it allowed me to save. If I change the view to CO Area Currency, it now still shows $153 CAD and Zero USD.

I ran program IMCRC3 using the following selection criteria:

I went back into IM52 to check the current budget and it had recalculated the CO Area Currency for overall, from $1200which was originally calculated using the old P rate of 1.20000, to the new value of $1046 calculated at the new P rate of 1.04660:

Next I returned the $1000 USD to verify that the CO Area curr would also be zero:

I supplemented $1000 annual and overall so I could deleted the original budget.When I deleted the original budget, it left -$153 Overall the difference between $1200 calculated using the old P rate of $1200 and $1046 calculated at the new P rate of 1.04660. Now we have the exact same issue as PRD.

Now that we have the same issue as PRD: Object Currency (USD) is zero, however we have a Co Area currency with a value other than zero, I am going to run the Currency Recalc program to copy the zero USD value to the Co Area Value, so they will both be zeroI ran Tcode IMCRC3 with following selection criteria:

Log showing it updated successfully:

Back to IM52 to check if CO Area Curr is zero:Success !! the $153 CAD is gone:

Now that the budget is totally removed from the project, I ran CJBN to Reconstruct Availability Control for the project.

I used Tcode OPSX to reset status BUDG on the WBS element.

I used Tcode CJBV to Reset budget Availability Control:

Running IMCRC3 in Production:Now I was ready to run program IMCRC3 – Currency Recalculation of Plan/Budget for Projects in the Production system. I used the selection criteria in screen shot below – note that I selected radio button: CO Area Currency from Object currency – this is because the budget for this particular project was entered in USD, so the CO Area currency had been incorrectly calculated for Overall, using the prior year’s P rate.

Since the USD budget had already been reduced to zero for this project, this program also reduced the Co Area Currency to zero for this project.

I ran Tcode CJBN to Reconstruct availability control for the project/s as per the suggestion in the results log of program IMCRC3 and I ran Tcode CJBV to Activate availability control again on the project.

You may also want to use Tcode OPSX to reset status BUDG on the WBS element if you have reduced the Budget on the WBS to zero. This may be necessary if you want to reassign the appropriation request to another IM Position.