In SAP S/4HANA, both account-based and costing-based Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) can be active simultaneously.

1. Actual Revenue: When a billing document is released to accounting, it generates a single controlling document. This document updates the Universal Journal (table ACDOCA) with a posting to a revenue account assigned to a profitability segment, which constitutes the update for account-based CO-PA. Concurrently, the same event updates the relevant value fields in the costing-based CO-PA tables. This ensures a simultaneous posting to both ledgers from a single business transaction.

2. Incoming Sales Orders: Costing-based CO-PA has a standard feature to update value fields upon sales order creation for early reporting on expected revenues. In S/4HANA, this capability is extended to account-based CO-PA through Predictive Accounting, which generates predictive journal entries in an extension ledger upon sales order creation. This allows for simultaneous reporting on incoming orders in both CO-PA types.

C. Standard cost of goods sold: The posting times differ. The cost of goods sold (COGS) is posted to the G/L and thus to account-based CO-PA at the time of goods issue. However, the COGS value is typically transferred to costing-based CO-PA during billing, which occurs later.

D. CO-PA valuated insurance costs: This refers to valuation, a feature primarily used in costing-based CO-PA to calculate and post amounts that do not have a direct G/L posting (e.g., estimated freight). These are not real postings and do not update account-based CO-PA, which relies on actual postings in the Universal Journal.

1. SAP S/4HANA 2023 Help Portal

"Profitability Analysis": The section on "Transfer of Billing Documents to Profitability Analysis" details how revenue from SD billing updates both account-based (via G/L accounts in the Universal Journal) and costing-based (via value fields) CO-PA from the same source document.

2. SAP S/4HANA 2023 Help Portal

"Predictive Accounting for Sales Orders": This documentation explains that when a sales order is saved

the system generates predictive journal entries for anticipated revenue and COGS in an extension ledger. These entries are visible in account-based CO-PA reporting

mirroring the long-standing capability of updating costing-based CO-PA from sales orders.

3. SAP Learning Hub

Course S4F25 (Profitability Analysis in SAP S/4HANA)

Unit 4: Integration with Sales and Distribution: This course material explicitly states that the billing document interface (SD-FI-CO-PA) is the trigger for posting actual revenues to both types of Profitability Analysis. It also covers the transfer of incoming sales orders to costing-based CO-PA and the corresponding process using Predictive Accounting for account-based CO-PA.

4. SAP Press (2022)

"Controlling with SAP S/4HANA: Business User Guide"

Chapter 11

Section 11.3.2 "Data Flow from Sales and Distribution": This section clarifies the timing of COGS postings. It confirms that the accounting document for COGS is created at goods issue (updating account-based CO-PA)

while the update of the COGS value field in costing-based CO-PA is commonly linked to the billing document.