SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting 1909 is GA

We’re happy to announce the general availability of SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting 1909, as part of S/4HANA Finance 1909, on September 20, 2019. Our latest software version delivers on a series of new features to help you run your financial consolidation and close activities.

S/4HANA Finance for group reporting is the on-premise version of our next generation software for financial consolidation and close. We deliver one major on-premise release each year. From a functional standpoint, our on-premise version  inherits from all the features delivered in the cloud version each quarter. Release 1909 includes the following new and enhanced functionalities.

You’ll find below all key innovations delivered in the 1909 release.

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ADVANCED INTERCOMPANY MATCHING AND RECONCILIATION
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With 1909 we deliver on four new intercompany apps. These apps are designed for matching and reconciliation of intercompany. They help you perform smart reconciliation on transaction level, and streamline your company to corporate close process.

The intercompany reconciliation apps help you:

• Perform real-time reconciliation and error detection
• Accelerate your month-end closing
• Streamline your company to corporate closing
• Automate process to save operational costs
• Improve compliance via accurate transaction-level data matching
• Benefit from “one source of truth” for multi-dimension reconciliation including legal and management requirements

As a business end-user, our intercompany reconciliation apps provides you with the following key features:

• Check the reconciliation status overview (see the screenshot above) and detailed amount comparison reports
• List the document matching items to find which documents are matched based on which matching rules, which documents are not copied yet or are copied but not matched yet
• Manually assign or unassign document items, add notes, or follow up by triggering a workflow or auto-postings

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CLOUD DATA MAPPING

In release 1909, we deliver new apps to help you extract, transform and load data from any source system into S/4HANA Finance for group reporting consolidated data (ACDOCU). Our first use case, the Data Mapping apps allow you to define mappings between source dimensions from any external system and target dimensions available in S/4HANA. In this version, the source is limited to .csv files, and the destination is limited to the ACDOCU table of SAP S/4 HANA Finance for group reporting. The mappings can be directly created in Microsoft Excel files, and then uploaded in the Data Mapping definition tile. These mapping files will be used to transform data and import it into SAP S/4HANA, using the Run Data Mapping tile. You’ll find below a simplified architecture diagram of our first available use case. Moving forward, more development and innovation are planned for data mapping.

Please note that as of today, the Data Mapping apps are only available for the cloud version of our group reporting software. We plan to make these apps available for the on-premise version in 2020.

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ENRICHED CLOUD DATA COLLECTION

In release 1909, we’ve enriched our cloud Data Collection apps with the ability to use additional measures in the reports. You can now enter data in local currency, group currency, transaction currency and quantities, percentages for example (see screenshot above). In addition, when you define a report, you can use a new method called “Selection by property” which allows you to create dynamic reports with characteristics values based on FS item property.
Please note that as of today, the Data Collection apps are only available for the cloud version of our group reporting software. We plan to make these apps available for the on-premise version in 2020.

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ENHANCED INTEGRATION WITH SAP ANALYTICS CLOUD

With 1909, we deliver two new web service APIs that enhance the connectivity with SAP Analytics Cloud. The first API is designed to populate and refresh SAP Analytics Cloud dimensions based on S/4HANA Finance for group reporting master data. The second is dedicated to populating and refreshing the SAP Analytics Cloud model’s facts from S/4HANA Finance for group reporting reported or consolidated data. The refresh of SAP Analytics Cloud is done either on-demand or on a regular basis with scheduled queries. Our SAP Analytics Cloud analysis reports include Planning, Actual, Predictive P&L reports as well as a new group financial KPIs report (see screenshot above).

As depicted in the diagram below, in release 1909 we provide new integration features with SAP Analytics Cloud to run planning activities at the group level. Consolidation master data (such as FS items and Consolidation units) as well as reported or consolidated data from ACDOCU can be imported in SAP Analytics Cloud. Consolidated data is retrieved in SAP Analytics Cloud via Live connection.

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ACTIVITY-BASED CONSOLIDATION OF INVESTMENTS
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Consolidation of Investments (C/I) deals with the elimination of investment on investors and of equity of their subsidiaries. It calculates the non-controlling interests of the eliminated investment and equity and the differential amounts. Then it reclassifies the minority portion of profit and loss reported by the subsidiaries. The system performs these calculations and postings on the base of reported data for investment and equity and group-dependent investment share percentages.

Before 1909, you were able to automate C/I using the rule-based approach: the system performs C/I calculations and postings by processing a sequence of reclassification steps which you define in reclassification methods. Today, you can alternatively choose to reclassify your C/I with the activity-based approach: the behavior of this task is influenced by various configuration settings which are predefined and delivered by SAP.

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OTHER KEY NEW FEATURES AVAILABLE IN 1909
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In release 1909, you can also benefit from a number of other new capabilities that we developed for the cloud version and are now available on-premise.

• Streamlined master data maintenance with the Import Consolidation Master Data app
• Data Mapping apps to transform and load data from non-SAP systems
• Easier selections with the new Fiori Define Selections app
• Improved Data and Consolidation Monitors
• Enhanced preparation for consolidation group changes

You can find more detail on the features above here.

• Intelligent Reporting Logic
• Group Data Analysis apps
• Matrix Consolidation
• Group Structure apps

You can find more detail on the features above here.

• Consolidation validation result analysis
• Drill through from consolidation validation logs to the SAP S/4HANA company level
• Time dependent mapping between financial statement items and G/L accounts
• Account driven consolidation rules

You can find more detail on the features above here.

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MORE INFORMATION
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Here’s more information on S/4HANA Finance for group reporting 1909 release:

• Intelligent ERP: SAP S/4HANA 1909 Release
• S/4HANA Finance for group reporting Help Portal
• What’s New Viewer
• Product road map
• S/4HANA 1909 release information note
• S/4HANA 1909 release restriction note

For continuous updates and information on our next-gen consolidation software, you can also follow our tag SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting.