SAP Analytics Cloud Allocation: Part 1: Basic Scenario: Allocation by Entity

This blog post is the first 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, 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.

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 the Allocation Step:
Create an allocation step with a source dimension and target dimension of entity. We will need to specify our accounts that we want to allocate in the “Filter by Accounts” options. We could also specify this in the allocation rule but we would have to choose one account at a time.

Create the Allocation Rule:
Once we create the Allocation Step, we can add the details to the Allocation Rule. For this rule, we have specified the Cost Collector (our IT department) as the source entity (sender), headcount as the driver and the parent node All Portfolios as the target entities (receiver)

Once we’ve created the Allocation process, we can test it. Let’s look at our source data.

Source Data:
On our source data, we will focus on the EXP1 line for January – we want to allocate out $62,500.

Headcount (Driver) Data:
When the system runs the allocation, it will calculate the amounts each Entity receives based on the data stored against headcount data. In our example, if we focus on January, P1_L will receive 10% of the costs incurred on the Cost Collector (10/100=10%)

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 10% of $62,500 was allocated correctly. Please see calculation below.

Calculation:
Source Amount for Cost Collector/Input/Jan: $62,500

P1 Large/HC/Input value: 10/100= 0.1

$62,500 *0.1 = $6,250