Revenue Recognition – Change in Write-Off Effective Date

With SAP Business ByDesign Release 2202 a change of the effective date for write-offs with respect to revenue recognition has been made. This change leads to a higher transparency because cost relating from written-off expenses get realized earlier. In this blog post I will further explain the reason and the impact of the change.

Expense reporting, supplier invoicing and time recording for customer projects often happens late at the end of a period. In some cases, part of the cost related to time recordings needs to be written-off, as they shall not be invoiced to the customer. The project lead sometimes does not have a chance to update the write-offs before the last day of the period. With the intention to influence revenue recognition and project cost he does it immediately before the period-end-closing in the first days of the new period.

Up to release 2202 the date when the project lead recorded the write-off was regarded as effective date. Therefore, a write-off on 2. December of a time confirmation which was recorded on 30. November was NOT taken into consideration by the revenue recognition for period-end-closing in November.

With release 2202 the date when a project member recorded the time is regarded as write-off effective date. Because of this change a write-off on 2. December of a time confirmation recorded on 30. November is taken into consideration by the revenue recognition for period-end-closing in November.

The following example provides an overview of the changes.

Please note:

Write-offs already recorded BEFORE the upgrade of the system to 2202 keep the former logic of write-off effective date derivation.

This short explanation shall help to understand the reason and impact of the change made to the write-off effective date in SAP Business ByDesign.