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jraymond15
Explorer
This blog post is the fifth 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. As you collected your costs, you stored them against 2 different audit trails and when you allocate your costs, you want to ensure the weighting of each audit trail is considered.

Allocation Process:

Create an 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 can use the “Reference Dimension” to weight the values assigned during allocation. In this scenario, we’ll define “Audit Trail” as the Reference Dimension.


 

Create an 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). We don't need to specify anything for our audit trail, as each audit trail will be considered individually since we have included it as a reference dimension.


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 specify a reference dimension, the system will consider each audit trail individually. In this example, if we focus on P1_L for January, we expect 10% of Input's costs to be allocated (10/100) and 20% of input2's costs to be allocated (20/100).


 

Source Data:

On our source data, we will focus on the EXP1 line for January for each audit trail - we want to allocate out $62,500 for Input and $100,000 for Input2.


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 on input and 20% of $100,000 on input2 were allocated correctly. Please see calculation below.


Calculation:

Source amount for Cost Collector/Input/Jan/EXP1: $62,500
Cost Collector/Input2/Jan/EXP1: $100,000

Driver: P1 Large/Input/HC/Jan: 10/100= 0.1
P1 Large/Input2/HC/Jan: 20/100= 0.2

Result: P1 Large/Input/EXP1/Jan: $62,500 *0.1 = $6,250
P1 Large/Input2/EXP1/Jan: $100,000 *0.2 = $20,000

 

To demonstrate what this scenario would look like without the Reference Dimension:

Without the use of a reference dimension, the allocation would have calculated each entity as a whole (regardless of audit trail). For example, the headcount values would have calculated as follows:

P1_L/Input = 10 + P1_L/Input2= 20 = 30
30/200=0.15
So, 15% of input and input2 will be allocated


Results:

The results would have looked like this:


 

Calculation:

Source amount for Cost Collector/Input/Jan/EXP1: $62,500
Cost Collector/Input2/Jan/EXP1: $100,000

Driver: Driver is now calculated as a total for P1 Large:
P1 Large/Input/HC/Jan: 10 + P1 Large/Input2/HC/Jan: 20 = 30/200 = 0.15

Result: P1 Large/Input/EXP1/Jan: $62,500 *0.15 = $9,375
P1 Large/Input2/EXP1/Jan: $100,000 *0.15 = $15,000