Capital Expense Planning in SAP

BY VIZIO CONSULTING INC.

A capital item is an asset carried on the balance sheet and depreciated over a set period, such as real estate, office furniture, or company vehicles.

Any company’s goal is to effectively serve customers, use available cash wisely, and advance short- and long-term business goals. Companies that can effectively do all three tend to track how much capital they invest versus operating costs and determine which CapEx investments resulted in profit and financial losses.

What is CAPEX?

Capital expenditures (CAPEX) are funds a business spends to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as real estate, plants, buildings, technology, or equipment. CAPEX is beneficial for companies to fund new projects or investments.

Capital expenditures on fixed assets can include repairing a roof, purchasing equipment, or constructing a new factory. Companies make this type of financial investment to expand the scope of their operations or to add some economic benefit to the process.

Capital expenditure (CAPEX) is a payment for goods or services recorded on the balance sheet (or capitalized) instead of deducted from the financial statements.

CAPEX includes purchasing business vehicles, buildings, furniture, land, machinery, computer equipment, and even patents and licenses that you can resell.

The formula for calculating CAPEX is as follows:

CAPEX= PP&E (current) – PP&E (prior) + depreciation

Why is CAPEX Planning Important?

Smart financing decisions help businesses grow. In terms of long-term financial planning, CAPEX analysis assists leaders in determining whether an asset offers an attractive rate of return. Companies can then strike a balance between maintaining existing equipment and property and having enough capital to invest in growth.

Other significant factors are:

Initial costs: Capital expenditures are generally more expensive than acquiring the use of the same asset on an operating basis, depending on the industry. Consider purchasing a fleet vehicle instead of leasing or signing up for a contract delivery service. It is critical to comprehend the long-term advantages of owning an asset.

Irreversibility: When a company reverses a capital expenditure, it will almost certainly incur losses. Because the market for capital equipment is typically weak, acquired assets are likely to be better used by the company itself.

Depreciation: Once we use an asset, depreciation begins, decreasing an organization’s asset accounts.

CAPEX Planning in SAP

SAP Business Planning includes built-in business processes to help with capital expenditure planning. Workflow is integrated into business process flows. You can configure the process management for both project-based and non-project-based scenarios.

Driver Based Model:

It is critical to developing a driver-based model when planning capital expenditures. Asset rates, useful life,

depreciation methods, and so on would be the drivers. In a planning situation, creating a driver-based model will assist in performing multiple what-if analyses to determine the impact of capital expenditure.

Depreciation and amortization:

Depreciation or amortization is allocating capital expenditure over the useful life of an asset. This allocation affects the asset’s profit and loss position over its useful life. We can use various methods of depreciation on multiple types of investments. The Straight Line method is the most popular in which the amount is allocated evenly over the asset’s estimated useful life. Different asset classes depreciate differently, and the tool should account for this. Amortization refers to the allocation of intangibles.

How does VIZIO Consulting’s CAPEX Solution help?

Search no further if you need a quick fix to amplify your capital planning process, give it recognition, and infuse
wisdom into the entire process.

VIZIO can provide you with a CAPEX solution that allows you to plan the entire life cycle of the capital planning exercise from start to finish using SAP platforms such as BPC Embedded and SAP Analytics Cloud.

Furthermore, as part of the CAPEX solution, our Asset Replacement planning solution assists in the proactive planning of future investments and asset replacements based on automated tracking of the asset’s life cycle and degradation cycle.

The key features of VIZIO Consulting CAPEX solution are:

  • Data Collection for new capital projects
  • Cash flow projections
  • Viability scoring & project ranking
  • Risk scoring
  • Project costing
  • Cost Allocation

Here was the complete guide to CAPEX planning in SAP and its importance. CAPEX planning is a critical component of the planning process, and it is built into the SAP Business Planning product.

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