After cost sets and elements have been created, you can enter costs. You can use Item-Element Cost Maintenance (30.17.5) to enter costs manually, or have the system calculate these costs based on other cost elements in the cost set.

Item-Element Cost Calculation (30.17.10) lets you calculate the value for a particular cost element as a percentage of one or more cost elements. For example, you can set up Freight as 10% of Domestic Material costs and 30% of Foreign Material costs. You can specify whether the system should calculate costs as a percentage of an item’s this-level or lower-level costs.

The ability to calculate a particular cost element as a percentage of lower-level costs is especially important for companies that calculate fixed overhead as a percentage of total material costs.