Migrating to S/4 HANA Finance – Installation and Customizing

My previous post “How to get ready for S/4 Finance” gives an overview of “Preparation” phase. This posts provides an overview of “Installation” and “Customizing” phases of S/4 HANA Migration from Finance perspective.

Installation

Installation of S/4 HANA is done by Basis team. I am not covering this phase in detail as this is a Basis task. The complete list of installation tasks i.e for S/4 HANA 1610, can be found in the SAP help portal

SAP S/4 HANA 1610 Installation Guide

Following happens during the installation phase.

• *_BCK tables are created. For example, FAGLBSAS_BCK(Secondary Index for cleared items). The contents of original tables are copied to the back up tables. The original table contents and the tables are deleted. The corresponding DDL SQL views are created with the same name of original table. After installation, the table FAGLBSAS becomes FAGLBSAS_BCK table with data and a DDL SQL view of FAGLBSAS.
• After the installation, document postings are not possible until the migration is completed
• As the tables have no data, no reporting is possible until the migration completed.

Customizing

Following customizing activities needs to be completed as applicable after the SUM (Software Update Manager) completes the installation

If the IMG menu is missing, the program RFAGL_SWAP_IMG_NEW can be used to activate the IMG menu path

General Ledger

• It is important NOT to activate the New GL manually. This activation happens automatically in the following tasks
• Run the pre-check program FINS_MIG_PRECHECK to check any inconsistencies or errors
• The fiscal year variants for productive Controlling Areas and their corresponding Company Codes must be same
• Make sure the Accounting Principles and Valuation Areas are defined
• A separate document type for postings from CO to FI.
• Define the source ledger and target ledger for migration
• Run the consistency check for General Ledger settings
• The business functions FIN_GL_CI_1, FIN_GL_CI_2 and FIN_GL_CI3 should be active.
• Unlike the migration to new GL, all years with postings should be migrated to S/4

New Asset Accounting

As mentioned in “Getting Ready for SAP S/4 HANA” the pre-checks and migration to new asset accounting can be a separate project by itself. Following needs to be done as part of S/4 migration

• Migrating every COD (Chart Of Depreciation) is required even if the new asset accounting is already in place. The sample CODs can not be migrated.
• Make sure the accounting principle is assigned to each depreciation area. The ledger group is derived from the accounting principle
• Delta areas are not relevant anymore. SAP recommends deleting the delta areas
• The leading depreciation area posts in real time for each accounting principle, ledger and account approach
• Define a new Technical Clearing Account for Integrated Asset Acquisition
• Specify alternate document type for Integrated Asset Acquisitions.
• There are no restrictions on transaction types to depreciation areas
• The depreciation plan needs to be migrated twice. This is because there won’t be any ledger groups during the first migration

Profitability Analysis CO-PA

• If used, execute the BW delta extractions for account based CO-PA. You can do this activity prior to installation after taking the system down. Please note that this is different in case of implementing Near Zero Downtime (NZDT)
• The customizing step “Adapt Settings for Profitability Analysis” deletes all the settings for summarization as it is no longer needed in S/4. The summation happens dynamically from the line item table ACDOCA.
• SAP recommends account based CO-PA over costing based. Should there be a need to define and activate CO-PA, account based CO-PA is recommended.
• If the costing based CO-PA is used, it can be used as before. Costing based CO-PA will perform much faster due to S/4 migration
• Account based and Costing based CO-PA can both run in parallel
• If used, a thorough testing of costing based CO-PA involving the business stakeholders is highly recommended

Material Ledger

• Material ledger activation is required for S/4 HANA
• Material Ledger uses the currencies defined in financials leading ledger. Separate customizing of currencies is no longer needed.
• Materials not relevant for actual costing are no longer valuated in material ledger
• All attributes of the material ledger data model are now part of ACDOCA table. Many of the ML tables are converted to DDL SQL views.

Next…… S/4 Universal Journal Migration and Post Processing