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Alex_Borell
Advisor
Advisor
You’ve probably got a secret list of the best SAP S/4HANA applications for working on a particular accounting task, but have you ever wondered if there might be a better SAP application that you are missing? Or maybe you’ve asked yourself: How do apps with similar names, things like Display Line Items in General Ledger and Display Line Item Entry, actually differ from a feature point of view? SAP Fiori apps for Finance give you a clean and modern user experience but do they always cover all the features that you’ve come to know in the classic SAP GUI transactions? How can you tell? How does a certain Fiori app compare to its classic SAP GUI counterpart from a feature perspective?

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the coexistence of SAP Fiori apps and their functionally-related classic SAP GUI apps is needed to support fewer and fewer use cases. The standard business catalogs for Finance are designed to keep functional overlaps between SAP Fiori apps and classic SAP GUI transactions to a minimum. The classic SAP GUI apps that are included in SAP S/4HANA Cloud business catalogs in Finance are only a small subset of all classic transactions.

A comparison of delivered features is more important for SAP S/4HANA customers who are modelling roles in an initial implementation project. In contrast to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, all classic SAP GUI transactions can be used by building custom business catalogs, and the features offered in an SAP Fiori app and its functionally-related classic SAP GUI application can really differ. One of the reasons for these differences is that classic SAP GUI transactions are built to cover a multitude of use cases. This especially holds true for very powerful classic SAP GUI transactions that provide as many functions as a Swiss army knife. SAP Fiori apps, on the other hand, only cover a well-defined subset of functions to cater to specific use cases. For example, in general ledger accounting, many functions offered by the Post Document, Post Journal Entries (FB01) transaction are covered but in a combination of SAP Fiori apps. Depending on a customer's specific requirements, a different set of apps may be most useful to them, independent of the underlying technology. However, we have heard that it isn't always clear to you, our customers and consultants, if a certain feature is covered in a certain app, especially since innovations are mainly provided for SAP Fiori apps.

To help you out, we’ve created some new accounting documentation available on the SAP Help Portal: Feature comparison documents now provide you with an overview of the features covered in a particular functional area, such as general ledger accounting or inventory accounting. But the documents don’t just list the features of different apps. Instead, they are designed to compare a set of apps to highlight the similarities and differences in their functional scope. Thanks to the feature comparison documents for SAP S/4HANA, you don´t have to wonder any longer which app to choose to support your process or use case. This is not just about trying to convince you to use SAP Fiori apps over classic SAP GUI transactions but an attempt to make your life easier by supporting you in choosing the right apps during implementation to cover your desired use case in the best way.

This blog focuses on accounting in Finance, but some of the roles cover a very broad scope with many apps. That´s why we decided to start by documenting transactions and apps with high usage numbers. To better group functionally-related SAP Fiori apps and classic SAP GUI transactions that still have a deviating functional scope, we decided to group together the applications needed for common tasks in accounting, things like working with account balances or posting journal entries. This allowed us to include more functions of very powerful classic SAP GUI transactions, such as FB01.

To focus on applications with a potential functional overlap between SAP Fiori and classic SAP GUI, we then excluded SAP Fiori apps with very high usage rates, assuming that these SAP Fiori apps already completely cover the major use cases they are intended for. This means that we won’t be providing feature comparisons for every single SAP Fiori app but only for those where related classic SAP GUI transactions are still relevant in terms of usage rates.

Looking at accounting app usage in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we saw a trend: When there is a pair of applications, one SAP Fiori and one classic SAP GUI, the SAP Fiori apps are used more often. While SAP S/4HANA customers may opt not to implement SAP Fiori, we hope the feature comparison documents give them a reason to think again and give SAP Fiori a try.

In the feature comparison documents on the SAP Help Portal, you can now compare the features of similar accounting applications, at one glance, filtering and searching in the tables, and easily navigating to more information about the apps.

 


Feature Comparison for Resetting Cleared G/L Account Line Items


 

So far, the following feature comparison documents with a focus on accounting are available on the SAP Help Portal:

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