This blog provides you with the latest and greatest finance innovations within SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811. This quarter, we continue to deliver valuable innovations such as the automatic calculation and posting of purchase order accruals, the new SAP Fiori app 'Interest Rate Overview', and more.
Check out my video below which covers three key innovations for finance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AJOW7GDNQ&feature=youtu.be
First, I will illustrate the innovations covered in the video above.
Automatic Calculation and Posting of Purchase Order Accruals
One of the most important Finance highlights is our new purchase order accruals functionality which allows you to significantly speed up your closing process and to increase transparency. As soon as a third-party liability (for example a purchase order) arises and the related payment has not yet been made, the related accruals need to be posted. As of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811, you can automatically transfer new purchase orders into the Accrual Engine where you can monitor, review, adjust, and even approve the corresponding accrual amounts. Afterwards, the system can automatically post the accrual amounts.
Figure 1: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Review Purchase Order Accruals' allows you to adjust the accruals for your purchase orders
Interest Rate Overview
In finance, we deliver another important innovation - a new overview page for treasurers. With this app, you can display an overview of your interest rate related financial risks including current interest rate, historic interest rate, and yield curves, on a selected key date. In addition, it provides an overview of debt and investment related financial risks, including maturity profile, total debts and investments by key date, debt and investment by interest category and reference interest rate.
Figure 2: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Interest Rate Overview' displays your interest rate related as well as debt and investment related financial risks
Group Reporting
When it comes to maintaining financial statement items, we further increased usability and flexibility for finance professionals with two brand new SAP Fiori apps: The 'Define Financial Statement Items' app allows for individual or mass maintenance of financial statement items thus minimizing the necessity to upload FS items for maintenance. In addition, the app allows you to delete FS items providing a where-used list check prior to deletion. The new 'Map FS items with G/L accounts' app enables you to map your FS items either individually or collectively. Thanks to the revision feature, you can create multiple time-dependent versions of your mappings to keep track of account changes and report accordingly over time.
Figure 3: With our new SAP Fiori app 'Map FS Items to G/L Accounts', you can map your FS items either individually or collectively
Another important innovation that I don’t want to hide from you is our new SAP Fiori app 'Validation Result Analysis'. It increases your validation transparency and usability by providing graphics showing validation errors and allows you to filter related validation rules by different attributes before drilling down to the individual rule triggering the error. You can also use the new drill-through feature from the validation log to see the accounting documents affected.
Figure 4: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Validation Result Analysis' allows you to filter related validation rules by different attributes
Contract Accounting and Invoicing – Provider Contract Master Data
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811, you can import provider contracts from a source system outside of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This innovation complements the pay-per-use and billing scenarios as the provider contract is the central master data when it comes to managing subscriptions. As processes in contract accounting and billing are highly automated, there is no need to create or change provider contract master data. The new functionality allows you to create recurring and one-time charges for billing plans that are assigned to the provider contract. In addition, you can execute pricing for recurring and pay-per-use charges via the pricing procedure assigned to a provider contract item.
Inventory Balance Sheet Valuation
This innovation, too, is a period-end closing activity. It allows you to calculate material prices for subsequent use in external or internal balance sheets. As valuation procedures, you can choose between lower of cost or market and the first in, first out (FIFO) method. Regarding lower of cost or market, you can choose between lowest value determination based on range of coverage or based on market prices. If you want to determine the lowest value based on range of coverage, you can use our new Fiori app 'Determine Lowest Value – Range of Coverage'. If you want to execute the lowest value determination in the background, you can use our new Fiori app 'Schedule Inventory Accounting Jobs'.
With our new app 'Inventory Balance Sheet Valuations', you can analyze the results of the valuation procedures. Based on this, you can decide how to write down your balance sheet accounts. The app provides general information regarding the respective material such as total stock, total value, and valuation class as well as explanations of devaluations such as range of coverage, devaluation percentage, and valuation result. Moreover, it provides graphical displays of your inventory balance sheet valuation history sorted by period or fiscal year as well as graphical displays of your inventory history sorted by period or fiscal year.
Figure 5: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Inventory Balance Sheet Valuation' allows you to analyze valuations of inventories of current assets for the balance sheet
User-based Matching Rules
This new functionality significantly speeds up the identification, validation, and clearing of bank statement items as it allows you to create user-specific reprocessing rules for G/L account postings. You can select and execute individual reprocessing rules for repeatable tasks during bank statement postprocessing. The new functionality is fully integrated into our new SAP Fiori app “Reprocess Bank Statement Items”.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud for finance, check out the following links:
Follow me via Twitter or LinkedIn.
Check out my video below which covers three key innovations for finance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AJOW7GDNQ&feature=youtu.be
First, I will illustrate the innovations covered in the video above.
Automatic Calculation and Posting of Purchase Order Accruals
One of the most important Finance highlights is our new purchase order accruals functionality which allows you to significantly speed up your closing process and to increase transparency. As soon as a third-party liability (for example a purchase order) arises and the related payment has not yet been made, the related accruals need to be posted. As of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811, you can automatically transfer new purchase orders into the Accrual Engine where you can monitor, review, adjust, and even approve the corresponding accrual amounts. Afterwards, the system can automatically post the accrual amounts.
Figure 1: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Review Purchase Order Accruals' allows you to adjust the accruals for your purchase orders
Interest Rate Overview
In finance, we deliver another important innovation - a new overview page for treasurers. With this app, you can display an overview of your interest rate related financial risks including current interest rate, historic interest rate, and yield curves, on a selected key date. In addition, it provides an overview of debt and investment related financial risks, including maturity profile, total debts and investments by key date, debt and investment by interest category and reference interest rate.
Figure 2: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Interest Rate Overview' displays your interest rate related as well as debt and investment related financial risks
Group Reporting
When it comes to maintaining financial statement items, we further increased usability and flexibility for finance professionals with two brand new SAP Fiori apps: The 'Define Financial Statement Items' app allows for individual or mass maintenance of financial statement items thus minimizing the necessity to upload FS items for maintenance. In addition, the app allows you to delete FS items providing a where-used list check prior to deletion. The new 'Map FS items with G/L accounts' app enables you to map your FS items either individually or collectively. Thanks to the revision feature, you can create multiple time-dependent versions of your mappings to keep track of account changes and report accordingly over time.
Figure 3: With our new SAP Fiori app 'Map FS Items to G/L Accounts', you can map your FS items either individually or collectively
Another important innovation that I don’t want to hide from you is our new SAP Fiori app 'Validation Result Analysis'. It increases your validation transparency and usability by providing graphics showing validation errors and allows you to filter related validation rules by different attributes before drilling down to the individual rule triggering the error. You can also use the new drill-through feature from the validation log to see the accounting documents affected.
Figure 4: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Validation Result Analysis' allows you to filter related validation rules by different attributes
Contract Accounting and Invoicing – Provider Contract Master Data
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811, you can import provider contracts from a source system outside of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This innovation complements the pay-per-use and billing scenarios as the provider contract is the central master data when it comes to managing subscriptions. As processes in contract accounting and billing are highly automated, there is no need to create or change provider contract master data. The new functionality allows you to create recurring and one-time charges for billing plans that are assigned to the provider contract. In addition, you can execute pricing for recurring and pay-per-use charges via the pricing procedure assigned to a provider contract item.
Inventory Balance Sheet Valuation
This innovation, too, is a period-end closing activity. It allows you to calculate material prices for subsequent use in external or internal balance sheets. As valuation procedures, you can choose between lower of cost or market and the first in, first out (FIFO) method. Regarding lower of cost or market, you can choose between lowest value determination based on range of coverage or based on market prices. If you want to determine the lowest value based on range of coverage, you can use our new Fiori app 'Determine Lowest Value – Range of Coverage'. If you want to execute the lowest value determination in the background, you can use our new Fiori app 'Schedule Inventory Accounting Jobs'.
With our new app 'Inventory Balance Sheet Valuations', you can analyze the results of the valuation procedures. Based on this, you can decide how to write down your balance sheet accounts. The app provides general information regarding the respective material such as total stock, total value, and valuation class as well as explanations of devaluations such as range of coverage, devaluation percentage, and valuation result. Moreover, it provides graphical displays of your inventory balance sheet valuation history sorted by period or fiscal year as well as graphical displays of your inventory history sorted by period or fiscal year.
Figure 5: Our new SAP Fiori app 'Inventory Balance Sheet Valuation' allows you to analyze valuations of inventories of current assets for the balance sheet
User-based Matching Rules
This new functionality significantly speeds up the identification, validation, and clearing of bank statement items as it allows you to create user-specific reprocessing rules for G/L account postings. You can select and execute individual reprocessing rules for repeatable tasks during bank statement postprocessing. The new functionality is fully integrated into our new SAP Fiori app “Reprocess Bank Statement Items”.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud for finance, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811 Release Blog
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New Viewer
- Help Portal Product Page here
Follow me via Twitter or LinkedIn.
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