Lesson15.Display Variants for Line-item Reports

Lesson 15. Display Variants for Line-item Reports

This is the second of two lessons on customizing the layouts and contents of line-item reports. It deals with the procedures for creating and working with display variants.

Line-item reports are the typical format for the output of list-display transactions, which generate lists of related objects (see the Coda at the end of this book) as well as the hit lists of code searches (see Lesson 10). They are also found on the initial and output screens of some create, display, and change transactions, including many purchasing and human resources transactions.

Each row in a line-item report displays the data about a single object, such as a vehicle, material, or business expenditure. The data are arrayed in columns, which are capped by headers that identify the data, and the rows are usually organized vertically by default according to the contents of the first column. However, the content and layout of a line-item reportthe data it displays and the ways in which the data are arranged vertically and horizontallyare usually fixed by computer programmers, with the help of functional experts, when SAP is configured for your company. They may not necessarily meet your needs or interests as a user of the system.

For example, we demonstrate the procedures for creating and working with display variants in this lesson with the output of the KSB1 transaction. This output consists of a line-item report of the actual costs or expenditures for a department (or cost center) in a business or an organization. We run this transaction periodically for our department to keep track of our costs and to monitor the status of our budget. The output of this transaction displays these data about our costs on each line of the report by default (Figure 15.1):

• The number and name of the cost element or cost category (such as salary, travel, and lodging) in the first two columns

• The dollar value of the cost in the Val in rep curr column

• The currency type in the Obj curr column

• The total quantity

• The name and number of the offsetting account (the corporate ledger account from which costs are ultimately paid, which is not the same as our department budget account) in the last two columns

Figure 15.1. The default version of the output report of the KSB1 transaction.

This is not an especially useful report for us, for several reasons.

• It displays both the name and the number of the cost element in two columns. This is redundant. We need only one of these two bits of datapreferably, the name of the cost element.

• It displays the currency type. While our company is global in reach, all our costs are incurred in the United States, where the currency is always U.S. dollars, and so this column of data is not necessary.

• It contains a column for the total quantity, which is meaningless when dealing with salaries and other types of costsso much so, in fact, that there are usually no data in this column.

• It displays both the name and number of the offsetting account in two columns. Once again, this is redundant, but more important, these are the sorts of data that our accountant needs to worry about, not us.

• It does not display data on who spent our money, what exactly they spent it on, and what document they filed in the database to charge the cost to our account (very useful in case we need to have our accountant verify a charge).

To satisfy our business needs, we created a display variant for the output of the KSB1 transaction (Figure 15.2). This customized version of the line-item report displays these data for each cost:

• The cost element name (but not the number)

• The name, business group code (User), and department code (PaCC) of the person who charged the cost to our account

• The dollar amount of the charge (Val in RCrepresentative currency)

• The number of the fiscal document that was created in SAP to charge that cost to our account

• The document header text, which is a brief description of the nature of the expenditure that was charged to our account

Figure 15.2. Our display variant for the output report of the KSB1 transaction.

In addition, we modified the layout of this line-item report to do the following:

• Display a grand total of all our expenditures at the bottom of the Val in RC column
  
  
• Group the line items by the cost element name, and subtotal the costs for all the line items in each cost-element group (A)
  
  

This customized report is far more useful for our purposes, because it tells us in a nutshell who (by name and affiliation) spent our hard-earned money on what (by cost element name and document header text). In addition, it provides a document number that we can pass to our accountant in case we have questions about a charge to our account. Finally, it contains no data about offsetting accounts, currency type, or anything else that is either obvious or not of interest to us, so it is brief and to the point.

Line-item reports are one of the most common transactions that are executed in SAP, and display variants are a powerful tool for customizing their contents and layouts. This lesson provides instructions on creating and using display variants.