SAP Simple Finance: An Introduction

Jul 25, 2015

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With the arrival of SAP Simple Finance, SAP is integrating its

newest technologies into age-old business operations and you
need to keep up. Take a look at the applications that SAP
Simple Finance offers across planning, consolidation,
accounting, and compliance, and learn how they are pushing
Finance forward.
SAP Simple Finance includes all of SAPs solutions for finance,
powered by SAP HANA. With the arrival of SAP Simple Finance,
SAP is integrating its newest technologies into age-old
business operations and you need to keep up. Take a look at
the applications that SAP Simple Finance offers across
planning, consolidation, accounting, and compliance, and learn
how they are pushing Finance forward. The value map of
processes and supporting capabilities that is available for
finance, leveraging the portfolios of SAP ERP Financials; SAP
solutions for enterprise performance management; SAP
solutions for governance, risk, and compliance; and SAP
Business Objects business intelligence solutions. Lets look at
these processes in further detail:

Financial planning and analysis: Managing

performance is an iterative, ongoing process that allows
companies to forecast, plan, and budget on an ongoing basis.
With predictive analytics, finance can model and simulate
multiple scenarios with what-if simulations to calculate the
expected financial impact of business decisions.

Accounting and financial close: Streamlining the

financial close processes enables companies to close the books
quickly both from a legal and a group perspective with
accuracy and in full compliance with global regulatory
standards. Streamlining the financial close also provides
stakeholders with vital decision-making data faster.

Treasury and financial risk management: Companies

must optimize cash flow and manage liquidity, and integrate
these processes with multiple banks. In addition, finance
monitors investments and borrowing activities across multiple
geographies and currencies to secure the best possible
investment rates.

Collaborative finance operations: Core services

provided by finance include credit checks, collections and
dispute handling, invoice management, bank transactions, and
travel expense processing. Streamlining these processes
results in lower costs and fewer errors, and frees up finance to
pursue activities that add greater value.

Enterprise risk and compliance management: To

protect valuable financial data, processes must be tightly
controlled to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive

corporate assets, while detecting fraud and abuse. Finance can

proactively balance risk and opportunity across all financial
processes, from transactions to analytics.

Simpler IT with Choice

SAP Simple Finance marks the first step of s-innovations, which
are a new line of modular solutions for lines of business and
industries natively built on the SAP HANA in-memory platform,
fully designed with the SAP Fiori user experience. As such, SAP
Simple Finance is offered in a variety of consumption models,
including on premise, in a managed cloud, and a hybrid of
cloud and on premise deployments. Lets look at the
deployment options for customers.
On Premise
Some customers may prefer to continue to run their SAP
implementations on premise, meaning that the software is
installed in their own data center in one or more of their own
sites. An on premise implementation involves having full
control over the system and its implementation, including
functional configuration and the ability to make modifications.
The companys IT team also manages its own security and
governance. Each company maintains the software with any
applicable enhancement packages and hot fixes, and chooses
the timing of implementing any upgrades. With this option,
companies license the software, which is typically financially
managed on the balance sheet as a capital expense that is
depreciated over time. They also must use SAP HANA to

leverage the new functional capabilities of SAP Simple Finance,

such as SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA1 and SAP Cash
Management powered by SAP HANA,2 which were natively built
on SAP HANA.
Cloud
Companies that want to deploy SAP Simple Finance in the
cloud can use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. With this managed
service, SAP maintains the servers and the software of an
organizations implementation. The software is installed on
servers that are dedicated to a single customer, allowing each
customer to configure unique functional business processes;
however, modifications are not allowed. The customer still
manages the applications and governance rules, and has the
ability to be on a different release than other customers, again
since customers are assigned their own hardware servers. As
part of the managed service, SAP takes care of implementing
technical maintenance, handling hot fixes, and performing
upgrades. Companies still need to license the software
capabilities, and then purchase the infrastructure and
application management on a subscription basis. The systems
in the managed cloud are run on SAP HANA, which gives
organizations the ability to use the latest innovations of SAP
Simple Finance.
Hybrid
An increasingly attractive model is the combination of on
premise and cloud implementations. Ideal candidates for these

scenarios are point processes that can be easily carved out and
do not require close integration with the remaining SAP
Business Suite for example, companies can use ARIBA
Network for invoice management, or solutions for cloud-based
travel and expense management.
Alternately, large companies that have an on premise
implementation may choose to run specific organizations
remote sales offices, subsidiaries, or recent mergers and
acquisitions, for example in the cloud, with an integration
into their on premise systems for consolidated reporting and
disclosures.

SAP Simple Finance Applications

From cash management to financial close and consolidation,
see what powerful applications SAP Simple Finance offers, and
how they can change your financial operations.

In-memory technology and SAP HANA

Redundancy removal

Non-disruptive innovation

Flexible reporting

Data aging

Universal journals

SAP Simple Finance applications

Deployment and adoption

SAP Fiori

Central Finance
For any suggestion/feedback or for technical details, reach me
atdinesh.18gbu@gmail.com.

Written by

Dinesh
Kumar
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Venkateswara Reddy

SAP FICO Consultant at SAT Infotech Pvt Ltd.

Nice one with Helpful Info thanks Sir
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3 months ago

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AP Simple Finance: A real time promise to

deliver
Oct 19, 2015
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According to SAP, Simple Finance encompasses a full range of

finance functions, including planning, analysis, accounting,
financial operations and consolidation, to meet the evolving
business needs of finance departments. With SAP Simple
Finance, users enjoy the simplicity of secure cloud delivery and
a beautifully redesigned user interface, while leveraging new
capabilities which promise to do nothing less than transform
finance processes and finance departments.
New Architecture

Simple finance as add-on for the SAP Business Suite on HANA,

or as integrated part of S/4 HANA, brings new functionalities
that were not possible in the non-HANA SAP environment.

The redesigned architecture removes the old aggregation

tables, where the most important financial data was
summarized on company, period and year level. By migrating
to SAP Simple Finance, these aggregations are simply removed
in a non-disruptive way. Reports can now be built based on the
lowest data level, i.e. the actual invoice, goods receipt or stock
transfer items.

Finance and controlling are now completely linked to each

other into 1 logical document, via the same references. The
goal of the next release is to take this logical link even a level
further, delivering a physical document.

A selection of SAP Simple Finances advanced capabilities and

innovations include:

Providing a single source of truth between transactions

and analytics to streamline and eliminate cycle times and
reconciliations of the data. Moreover, as of simple finance your
reporting becomes fully agile. FI, CO (and Account based COPA) are being linked on line-item level, which enables you to
drill down from a companys financial statement to the
(controlling) line-item. Linking account based CO-PA adds the
possibility to report on your profitability customer, product and
other (custom) characteristics within this same report.

New on-the-fly capabilities for moving finance processing,

such as month-end activities, from batch to real time

Innovative rapid planning and forecasting combined with

predictive analysis to explore new business models and
immediately assess potential effects on the bottom line

New reporting and analytics capabilities for finance users

with self-service access to all information, allowing instant
insight-to-action

Connections to business networks in real time to establish

an integrated business ecosystem and help drive optimal
collaboration with customers, suppliers, banks and government
authorities

Global regulatory compliance capabilities across

currencies, languages and industries with built-in legal
compliance capabilities and continuous risk assessment along
all enterprise processes

This new architecture enables new functionalities and

optimizes your financial processes

SAP Simple Finance uses and strengthens the power and

user-friendliness of SAP FIORI, which leads to an easier user
interaction with your figures. SAP FIORI is the new user
interface of SAP, getting rid of old transaction codes and
working in designed tiles, even available on your mobile
device, which is improving productivity. During the next waves
of new FIORI applications, SAP will release many new userfriendly apps focused on finance, based on SAP Simple Finance.
Gaining Influence over IT Spending
As a leader in finance solutions for the last several decades,
SAP is well known to CFOs across industries and around the
globe. Leading off S/4 HANA with Simple Finance is a smart
way for SAP to strengthen its relationship with CFOs and the
companies they serve, and a sound strategy for driving
adoption of future S/4 HANA solutions. Chief financial officers
are becoming increasingly influential over IT spending. A
recent Gartner study shows that CFOs (at 32%) have more
influence over IT spending than any other executive alone.

As reported by ComputerWeekly.com, over 40% of respondents

to a survey conducted by Forrester Research said that CFOs
will gain more influence over technology spending during the
next 12 months.
The connection between a companys IT capabilities and
financial leadership is growing increasingly tighter. As Renee
Murphy, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said during
a Forbes interview, A failure in finance can impact IT, and a
failure in IT can impact finance. You cant make corporate
and/or board-level decisions without understanding that
relationship.
The 2014 Gartner Financial Executives International CFO
Technology Study reveals that, in addition to having a major
influence on technology spending, CFOs and their finance
departments are increasing reliant on technology solutions to
perform their duties.
Key findings include:

The top technology gaps point to a need for business

intelligence/analytics investments.

Cloud use and projections doubled from 2013 for many

finance-focused applications.

Eighty-one percent of organizations forecast a move to

the cloud for more than 50% of their future transactions.

The number of mobile applications is increasing,

particularly in large organizations.

Corporate performance management applications lead

BI/analytics investments.
S/4HANA is a new product fully built on the advanced inmemory platform, SAP HANA. While HANAs accolades for
speed are well earned, HANAs ability to dramatically simplify
enterprise architecture, reinforce stability, scale limitlessly, and
generate big savings in the process are equally impressive
lessons CFOs will learn in abundance when they begin their
organizations transformation by implementing Simple Finance.
For technical information/ suggestions, please write
atdinesh.18gbu@gmail.com.