Understanding the SAP Education Curriculum - Financial Accounting

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EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW - FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING CURRICULUM

Efficient finance operations provide the foundation for financial excellence. Without effective and streamlined financial business processes that enable you to reduce costs and resource demands, it's difficult to achieve the more advanced objectives of your enterprise.  Manual processes prevent Finance from becoming a strategic partner to the business. SAP software and services enable you to streamline and improve accuracy of financial processes, such as reporting cycles and receivables; control and manage corporate spend; and realize economies of scale through shared-service deployments.

With SAP Financials, we can help you:

• Improve corporate performance - SAP ERP Financials gives you the ability to quickly read, evaluate, and respond to changing business conditions with effective business strategies, such as defining financial targets, developing a suitable business plan, and monitoring costs and revenues during execution.
• Achieve faster closes - With SAP ERP Financials, you can streamline consolidation, process scheduling, workflow, and collaboration.
• Improve corporate governance and transparency - SAP ERP Financials provides a broader support for accounting standards and federal regulations, and improved administration of internal costs.
• Shorten days sales outstanding - SAP ERP Financials automates dispute, credit, and collections management, and offers electronic invoicing and payment capabilities that supplement traditional accounts receivable and accounts payable functions (FINANCIAL SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT).
• Optimize global cash management - With SAP ERP Financials, you can report, analyze, and allocate cash in real-time, and establish in-house banks or payment centers.
• Improve financial and managerial reporting - SAP ERP Financials gives you the flexibility to report performance by business unit, organization, or cost center.
• Improve process integration between finance and treasury - With SAP ERP Financials, you can integrate risk and treasury transactions with core accounting and financial reporting processes.
• Make finance costs more competitive - SAP ERP Financials helps you innovate processes, collaborate with supply chain partners, and establish global shared-service operations.

To gain the most from your financial solutions, SAP Education offers various types of training to help you understand the finance solution, its integration, and configuration:

Overview courses - better understand the financial solution and its integration to other SAP business solutions through the following classes:

• SAPFIN - SAP Financials
• AC206E - eLearning: Parallel Valuation and Financial Reporting (needed for IFRS requirements)

Business Process courses - gain an appreciation into the business processes used in the Financials solution through the following classes:

• AC010 - Business Processes in Financial Accounting
• AC050 - Business Processes in Financial and Management Accounting with the New General Ledger

Configuration courses - learn how to configure the financial business processes to take advantage of the benefits discussed above:

• AC200 - Accounting Customizing I - GL, AP, and AR
• AC201 - Accounting Customizing II - Payment and Dunning, Correspondence, and Interest Calculation
• AC202 - Accounting Customizing II - Special GL Transactions, Document Parking, Validation/Substitution, and Archiving
• AC205 - Financial Closing
• AC207 - Parallel Accounting and Reporting
• ACNA35 - Asset Accounting
• AC210 - New General Ledger
• AC212 - Migration to the New General Ledger

COURSES CRITICAL WITHIN THE CURRICULUM PATH

While there are many valuable classes within the Financial Accounting curriculum path, the following courses are absolutely critical to attend in order to gain the level of understanding needed for blueprinting your business process, configuring and testing your system, training your users, and finally, implementation of the business solution.  The courses are offered in both the public classroom and virtual live classroom environments.  To find the current course schedule, follow the hyperlinked course codes to the course description/schedule page.

SAPFIN is a 3-day class that provides project team members an overview of SAP Financials before embarking through the remaining Financial Accounting curriculum.  The course focuses on the (1) business processes available in the Financial Accounting and Management Accounting (purchase to pay, plan to product, and order to cash), (2) Financial Supply Chain Management, (3) the New General Ledger, and (4) portals within SAP Financials.  If you attend SAPFIN, the remaining financial courses will make more sense when detailed business process and configuration topics are discussed.

AC010 is a 5-day class designed for those who need a detailed understanding of General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Asset Accounting, Banking, and financial statement creation business processes critical to a project's business process blueprinting.  The course provides a wealth of instructor demonstrations and hands-on exercises as practice with the learned financial business processes.  This class is essential before moving into the AC200, AC201, and AC202 configuration classes as understanding the business processes before attempting to configure the system is a best practice.

AC050 is a hybrid 5-day SAP Financials class as it provides rich details about both Financial Accounting and Management Accounting.  It is designed for those who require an understanding of the basic Financial Accounting processes of general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and Management Accounting (Controlling) cost center accounting, cost element accounting, and internal order management.  The course also demonstrates the integration between Financial and Management Accounting.  Unlike AC010 and AC040, the New General Ledger is active so the lecture, demonstrations, and exercises will reinforce this functionality.  A basic understanding of the New GL will help students progress into the remaining New GL courses AC210 and AC212.

AC200 is a 5-day class designed for financial business process configuration specialists.  For your accounting solution to function properly, critical understanding of organizational units, fiscal years, posting periods, currencies and exchange rates, general accounts, customer/vendor accounts, bank master data, document control, posting control, automatic postings, input and display controls, open item clearing, incoming and outgoing payments, cash journal, and logistics integration is an absolute necessity.  This class is critical to take before system configuration and configuration testing begins.

AC201 is a 3-day successor of AC200 and is also designed for financial process configuration specialists.  This course will demonstrate the configuration of the AP automatic payment process and payment program; the AR automatic dunning process and dunning program; all aspects of correspondence; and the interest calculation.  AC201 is absolutely critical for students interested in the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable business processes and is a must if the student needs to proceed into the Procurement and Order Fulfillment classes.

AC202 is also a 2-day successor of AC200 and designed for financial process configuration specialists.  AC202 covers special GL transactions such as down payments and individual value adjustments, document parking in FI, validation and substitution in FI, and archiving.  The AC202 content is important for customers as the information discussed provides tips and tricks to making document posting run much smoother across the SAP Financial spectrum.

AC205 is a 5-day class designed for financial process configuration specialists interested in the financial month-end and year-end closing processes.  In particular, the topics covered are month and year-end closing in FI, its affects on balance sheet and income statement, preparatory closing posting in Logistics and Financial Accounting, FI period end closing configuration, technical and organizational closing activities and documentary steps, closing monitoring using the Closing Cockpit, inter-company reconciliations, and financial statement creation processes.   The collection 92 version of the class covers the closing aspects around the New GL.

AC207 is a 3-day class that will help you to understand basics regarding the mapping of parallel valuation/accounting in a SAP ERP system. After the course you should beable to describe, configure and operate the accounts and the ledger solution (within new G/L) on the basis of some typical showcases. Also you should be able to fulfil typical reporting requirements for international valuation standards. You will get a short overview of (additional) topics/processes which can be affected due to parallel valuation and will be able to outline the steps needed to be done to get a SAP system with release ECC 6.0 (with Enhancement Packages) and activated new G/L.

ACNA35 is the 5-day North American version of the global AC305 class covering the both the business process and configuration aspects of Asset Accounting.  The course covers the chart of depreciation, depreciation areas, asset classes, asset master data creation, asset transactions (acquisitions, retirements, transfers) and their integration and organizational flow, asset valuation, periodic processing (predominately depreciation), asset information system, and legacy data transfer topics.  This is the only asset accounting class in the FI curriculum map however there are other courses that cover the fringes of asset accounting such as AC020, AC350, PLM200, and AC405.

AC210 is a 5-day class that provides configuration information related to the New General Ledger.  If a student attended AC050 prior to their attendance at AC210; the configuration discussions will make much more sense as they will understand the New GL process before tackling the configuration aspects.  The topics covered in the class are New GL configuration such as activation, define and derive segments, assigning scenarios, and customer specific fields; documents and document splitting; integration of Management Accounting into Financial Accounting dues to the New GL; the affect on profit center accounting and cost of sales ledger; New GL reporting; closing operations; parallel financial reporting; and an outline of New GL migration.  Many students find this course a must before tackling the New GL at their companies.

AC212 is a 3-day successor of AC210 and is designed for students who have an excellent understanding of the New General Ledger and is responsible for its implementation.  The course covers the available migration options from the classic general ledger to the New GL environment and goes into depth around the practical aspects of managing a migration, the services provided by SAP to monitor the migration, and practice in the actual migration process.  Customers find this course important because they are able to address the important migration issues before trying it for themselves in their own environment.

ALTERNATIVE LEARNING OPTIONS

A viable alternative to public classes is our Solution Academy courses.  Like the public classes, the academy courses are also critical to attend in order to gain the level of understanding needed for blueprinting your business process, configuring and testing your system, training your users, and finally, implementation of the business solution.  In addition, the solution academy classes provide an excellent forum to prepare for certification exams.

TFIN50 is one of two solution academy courses that teach, over a 10-day period, almost identical content as found in the AC200, AC201, AC202, AC205, and AC280 public courses listed above.  The audience for the TFIN50 normally consists of consultants preparing for certification.  However, there are plenty of customers who actively participate in and benefit from the academy class setting and the interactions with the instructor and consultants.  The primary difference between TFIN50 and the AC* public classes is demonstrated in the accelerated instruction technique (10 days for TFIN50 versus 17 days for the AC* courses).  Depending on the instructor, you may also have more sample certification Q&A during the academy class to prepare the students for the course-ending certification exam.

TFIN52 is the second of the two FI solution academy courses that teach, over a 10-day period, almost identical content as found in the ACNA35, AC202, and AC210 public courses listed above.  The audience for the TFIN52 normally consists of consultants preparing for certification.  However, there are plenty of customers who actively participate in and benefit from the academy class setting and the interactions with the instructor and consultants.  The primary difference between TFIN52 and the AC* public classes is demonstrated in the accelerated instruction technique (9 days for TFIN52 versus 10 days for the AC* courses).  Depending on the instructor, you may also have more sample certification Q&A during the academy class to prepare the students for the course-ending certification exam.  Additionally, TFIN52 contains a case study students use to reinforce the materials and prepare for the certification exam.

TFIN5e is a soon-to-be-released eLearning version of the TFIN50 and TFIN52 solution academies.