‘Splitting’ is a process in SAP used to assign ‘activity-independent’ plans/actual costs, both primary andsecondary, of a cost center to the individual activity types within that cost center. But the important requirement is that you will use this when there is no account assignment to the activity types.
You may either use the Splitting rules or the Equivalence number to achieve this. When you split the costs from a cost center, the cost center temporarily becomes more than one cost center for the purpose of allocation but again becomes a single cost center when posting happens in the subsequent period.
If you need to assign different cost elements or cost element groups to activities in more than one way, then you need to define a ‘Splitting Structure’ containing ‘splitting rules’ to determine the criteria of splitting ‘activity-independent’ costs to an activity type. If you have created the splitting structure in customizing and assigned the same to a cost center, then the system uses the splitting structure for cost apportioning; otherwise, it will use the equivalence number.
The ‘splitting rules’ determine the amount or the proportion of costs to be allocated to various activity types of a cost center and is based on the consumption of these activity types. The costs thus allocated may be a fixed sum, or a percentage, or it can even be based on the tracing factors or SKFs.
The ‘equivalence number’ is a basic method for splitting the costs when you manually plan for each of the activity types. By this, you will plan all activity-independent costs according to the equivalence numbers (the default is 1).