SAP Simple Finance

A way through

Simple Finance

(sFIN)

by

Ankit Garg

SAP Simple Finance is first offering in S/4 HANA by SAP in 2015. Commonly, referred as ‘sFIN’ has completely changed FI/CO business solutions. First, we have to analyze earlier business process.

FI/CO Documents are separately processed having totals, indices & aggregates. This leads to redundant storage of data. At the time of Analytics, the indices are traversed twice for each FI-CO. Line items tables may contain redundant information, leading to wastage of storage.

Using non-sFIN system, the Analytics cannot be performed granularity level. Also, performance is minimal, as header & line item tables are to be traversed separately for FI & CO of each Document Number.

So The Solution is ….

sFIN is an add-on to ERP, which means it is a standard product developed to work on top of SAP ERP (ECC6.07 to be precise). The official name used to be ‘SAP Simple Finance add-on 2.0 for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA’ aka sFin 2.0. Simple Finance comes with a simplified data model, totals, tables and application index tables have been removed and replaced with HANA views with the same technical names.

Single Source of Truth –

In Simple Finance, SAP has introduced a new table named ‘ACDOCA’ for the Universal Journal. It allows bringing data from General Ledger, Asset Accounting, Material Ledger, Controlling (Including coding block & CO-PA) into one journal. By this one master stroke, SAP has overcome the need of reconciliation (FI & CO), has overcome the need of settlement(All cost elements, including secondary cost elements are G/L accounts) & has done away with index tables /aggregate tables.

The Journal Entry consists of a header (stored in table BKPF) & items (stored in table ACDOCA). (Table BSEG continues for items. But it stores items coming from classical FI postings like FB01, FB50, FB60, FB70 etc.)

• The line item, totals tables and application index tables of General Ledger Accounting (GLT0, BSIS, BSAS and FAGLFLEXA, FAGLFLEXT, FAGLBSIS, FAGLBSAS)
• The totals tables and application index tables of Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable (KNC1, KNC3, LFC1, LFC3, BSID, BSIK, BSAD, BSAK)
• The line item and totals tables of Controlling (COEP for certain value types, COSP and COSS)
• The material ledger tables for parallel valuations (MLIT, MLPP, MLPPF, MLCR, MLCD, CKMI1, BSIM)
• The Asset Accounting tables (ANEK, ANEP, ANEA, ANLP, ANLC)
• Profit Center Accounting (PCA), Sp. Purpose Ledger (FI-SL), & Consolidation (EC-CS) remain untouched & work as before. Components built with FI-SL technology like Joint Venture accounting & Public sector are untouched & work as before. Cost-based CO-PA works as before.

Although, many Tables in FI/CO are dropped but they can be accessed by SE11 as virtual tables fetching data through HANA Views. Also, FI –CO modules are remained intact to maintain SAP functional legacy.

Migration

Organizations on SAP (with traditional SAP FICO module) can migrate to Simple Finance (SFIN 2.0) in following way –

Those who are on New GL can directly migrate to SFIN.

Those who are on classical GL, need to first migrate to New GL (bare-minimum functionality, no need to have document splitting or parallel ledger) & then move to SFIN.

Follow steps mentioned in below links for migration to SFIN.

Useful Links  –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7guuQFfgiw

http://scn.sap.com/community/simple-finance/blog/2015/03/06/migration-to-simple-finance