This post builds upon the previous one and illustrates a third cost allocation approach that can be used in the standard D365 application. The third approach illustrated below makes once again use of direct costs that were recorded in the financial modules.

This time, the allocations are made based on different statistical dimensions (no. of employees, no. of company cars and production data) that are setup as statistical members in a first step.

Because the statistical data that are used for the cost allocations are not tracked in D365, they need to be imported via the data management framework. In the example used, the statistical dimension member data were prepared in an Excel file that was uploaded through the data management import framework.

The target fields of the respective data entity and the uploaded Excel data are illustrated in the next screenprints.

Once the statistical members are defined and the statistical member data uploaded, the allocation policy can be set up. This time in a way that the costs of the first supporting cost center no. 110 are allocated based on the number of employees working in the other cost centers. The costs of the car pool cost center are allocated to the other cost centers based on the number of company cars used there and the costs of the product management costs are allocated to the other operative cost centers based on the number of bikes produced.

Next, a cost accounting ledger is setup and the statistical measure data provider configured.

This configuration is done in a way that a link to the import source identifier from the uploaded Excel file is made. In addition, a link to the Excel column that includes the cost object data must be established.

As an example, in the screenprint above it is specified that statistical data for the employee statistical measure are imported. Through the dimension mappings field, one can determine the column of the Excel document that holds the cost object data. In the example used that information is tracked in the ‘dimension2’ column. For details, please see the Excel screenprint further above.

Once this setup is made, the statistical measure data need to be processed, that is imported into the cost accounting ledger.

All other processing steps are identical to what has been shown in the prior post and for reasons of brevity skipped.

As in the previous posts, the next illustrations summarize the different cost center costs and allocations.

The next screenprint summarizes – as before – the executed allocations for the different cost centers together with the allocation basis measures that have been uploaded.

In the next post, we will focus on another (hierarchy based) allocation technique. Till then.