Try Out SAP RealSpend on SAP HANA Cloud Platform
What is this all about?
The SAP RealSpend (BETA) solution is the first comprehensive tool that allows managers to improve decision-making with regards to their budgets and expenses. Detailed drill-down features make it possible to perform a fine-grained analysis of actual and future expenses, as well as the related forecast and budget plans. Furthermore, the manager is able to simulate the influence of certain decisions onto his budget situation (e.g., marketing, hiring, travel, or hardware decisions). Augmenting financial data through tagging enables flexible reporting beyond the classical ERP data model.
Key Pain Points Addressed
- Financial data stored in ERP is “after-the-fact” and not well-suited for efficient decision-making upon future financial data.
- Financial data (e.g., planning, actuals) can only be reported based on dimensions and characteristics which were foreseen by central controlling or finance departments.
- Implementation of new concepts and models takes too long in an ERP system.
Key Product Features
- Augment financial data with future expenses.
- Bottom-up planning based on future expenses.
- Flexible tagging to introduce new dimensions and characteristics for reporting on the fly.
- Full real-time integration with SAP Simple Finance and S/4 HANA.
- A simple way to declare top-down budgets.
Get Started, Now!
1. Register for or go to your own account on SAP HANA Cloud Platform Trial: https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/
Note: Chrome Web Browser or Safari is recommended.
2. Navigate to the Services tab on the left side
3. Find the SAP RealSpend Services under Category Business Services
4. Click Enable and wait a few seconds.
5. After the service is shown as “Enabled” click on it.
6. Inside the service select: RealSpend Launchpad
3. Accept the Terms of Use
4. If you want to use SAP RealSpend (Beta) in demo mode click on the Enable Demo Mode toggle.
Optional
6. If you want to enable real-time integration with your test on-premise ERP system please refer to the documentation: SAP RealSpend Solution 1.0 – SAP Help Portal Page
7. As an alternative to the real-time integration with your test on-premise ERP, the app is capable to import financial data from spreadsheets exported from your CO transactions KSB1, KSB2, KOB1 and KOB2. For details, refer to SAP RealSpend Solution 1.0 – SAP Help Portal Page
Questions and Feedback?
We would highly appreciate your questions or feedback. Please add your comments below or write the team directly via fincloud@sap.com
Release Notes
Release Notes of SAP RealSpend
Hi Philipp,
This looks very interesting - have you thought about how it might be positioned to a customer who is also looking at Integrated Business Planning for Finance or SAP Cloud for Planning?
thanks
David
Hi David,
excellent question. We are considering to integrate with / read from both IBP and C4P. On a technical level it is already possible (not doing it yet, though). Hence, the budget manager is not a replacement but enhances the capabilities with regards to our management accounting vision:
1. Because of several reasons in the company (e.g., process, cost-related), the top-down budgets are not broken further down in standard solutions. As implication, budgets are communicated and managed via other means such as Excel or E-Mail. Our solution acts like a scratch-pad for managers to have these numbers still integrated with the ERP + future data without falling back to Excel.
2. With our tagging technology, we can introduce new dimensions and characteristic which are not part of an ERP to allow managers to model their own individual view of the world (which otherwise has to be done in Excel). There might be use cases where you also want to plan on these newly introduced dimensions/characteristics which you can do with the Budget Manager without having IT project or Excel.
Still, our goal is not to be a full-fledged planning like IBP or C4P but to have an easy mechanism for managers where these solutions are not used.
Hope this answers your question.
Thanks
Philipp
Hi Philipp,
It is really awesome. I tried it out. There is a small suggestion.
During the walk through of the dashboards there is a requirement of going into the back end ERP system and add some costs and revenues and then show the same immediately reflecting in the dashboards.
Currently this process steps are missing and if we can include them in the speed demos as well it would be comprehensive and great to show to our customers.
Regards
Madhav Pai
Hi Madhav,
thanks for your comment. Yes, this sounds like a good idea.
If will come back to you when we have setup something for you.
Best regards
Philipp
Hi all,
there is now a new feature available. If you have access to the following ERP transactions:
you can now download data into Excel and upload manually into the application. Please refer to the documentation for additional details...
Philipp
Hi,
Getting an unauthorized error when tryng to launch real spend launchpad
HTTP Status 401 - Unauthorized
Hello Sree,
can you explain in detail which steps you conducted so far?
Thanks and kind regards
Marco
Hi Marco,
I have enabled the Service and clicked the link RealSpend Launchpad .once i click the link i see the 401 error .
Thanks,
sree
Hi Sree,
can you please check if your user has the Manager and ApiUser Role. To do so, please go to the management accounting services, click on configure services, select the roles tab and make sure that your user can be found under "Manager" role as well as "ApiUser" role.
Best regards
Philipp
Hi,
It was the Trust which was causing an issue . I have enabled custom Trust in my account which was causing that issue ,Now i can go to the Realspend app.
Thanks,
sree
Hello Philipp,
Nice looking app.
Had a play with the upload feature and I think I found a bug. The 'Timeline' subtotals for 'Actual', 'Committed, 'Approved', 'Pending' are not refreshing when one changes the analysis years:
2016 Data:
2015 data:
You can see from the above that the subtotals have not changed...perhaps a subtotal function on the line item table would be useful?
I'll have a further play and let you know if anything else pops out.
Thanks
Kris
Seems fixed now...thanks!
Kris
Hi Kris,
yes, thanks for reporting. We fixed it immediately and it was deployed in one our nightly shipments.
If you find further issues just let us know.
Thank you
Philipp
i see this thread is a couple of years old. I am working with a trial of Real Spend and am curious whether / how an alternatve fiscal year could be handled with this application? We are not on a calender year for financial reporting and budgeting.
Hi Loren,
yes this article is pretty old. Well, if you are currently using a Trial system I assume that there is no S/4System connected, right. If so, RealSpend (in standalone mode) can only work with calender years. However, if an S/4HANA system is configured it will fetch the fiscal year variant for the configured controlling areas according to your standard system configuration.
Best regards
Philipp
Thank you for the response. Although initially just using the demo data and Excel data, we actually would like to connect the trial version to one of our sandbox systems. Is this possible?
Hi,
I am the product Owner of SAP RealSpend and suggest we jump on a quick call to discuss?
why don´t you just send me one or two slots of your availability and I will try to make myself available.
you can reach me under kai.muehlbauer@sap.com
best regards,
Kai