Preview of New Smart Accounting Part 1

SAP’s Janet Salmon provided couple webcasts on the new Smart Accounting solution, now in ramp-up, last week.  I see this as a follow on to How HANA Impacts Product Cost Reporting – ASUG Webcast Part 1

The usual legal disclaimer applies:

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Things in the future are subject to change.

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Janet said that “Costing based CO-PA isn’t going away” but instead look at another alternative

Use cost elements to link CO-PA dimensions with accounts in FI

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows the original designs started in R2 – transact, record, in a financial document and then report on it

However it became complicated as databases more complicated so built new views

SAP had a separate ledger for COGS, CO reporting PS reporting – separate tables in the system

The vision was to report on raw data.

Then SAP moved information to Business Warehouse, but for some customers it takes 8 hours to move from Material Ledger to BW

With this solution SAP now collects transaction data in one data stream and reports on that

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Figure 4 shows “one data stream, granularity” with a “nicer user experience” and you can “close on the fly”.

The future vision is consolidation on the fly

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Janet said that “speed coming back is radically fast”.

Smart Financials assumes HANA underneath with a code split of two blocks: SAP-FIN and ERP-FIN

Logistics stay same, industry solutions stay the same

Interface hasn’t changed

With HANA Live content, it puts views on tables on ERP – like BW extractors

She said this is leaner, like “putting data on the fly”

Reduce Reconciliation Effort

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Logical link is provided between FI and CO for one document view

It uses HANA Live to drill down

It becomes an account based structure

Figure 7: Source: SAP

Figure 7 should look familiar to everyone who has taken an Intro to SAP Accounting Course (including me).  You can see there is no link between the FI and CO items.

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Certain requirements such as revenue postings and invoices can summarize in invoice but keep details in CO-PA

• Stop summarizing in FI
• Default in system is something to bear in mind

Key point made in Figure 8 is that FI and CO have the same level of granularity (they do not today)

Figure 9: Source: SAP

Figure 9 shows making a physical link between FI and CO now

Smart accounting is based on new general ledger

Sender receiver relationships usually cross FI

Part 2 is coming, where using the BI tools against the Smart Financials solution is shown, including Analysis Office.

Please note that SAP’s Vishal Sikka discusses BSEG and how we use it in this new Open SAP Course Course: An Introduction to SAP HANA by Dr. Vishal Sikka