From a financial perspective

CFOs face enormous pressure from business and financial regulatory authorities to ensure timely and accurate financial closings and reporting. SAP S/4 HANA finance, which runs on the SAP HANA database platform, is intended to help in this complex work. Formerly called Simple Finance, it combines two individual components of SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), namely, Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting, that simplify database tables containing important information.

The result is a faster financial close, as well as available analytics and dashboards that stream real-time information for faster decision making. Indeed, SAP S/4 HANA Finance offers the following features that may be of particular interest to CFOs:

Universal journal.
The universal journal entry enables faster period-end reconciliation and period-end closing. It is able to do so by combining the features and data available in the Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting components of SAP ECC in a one-line item and with real-time data.

Efficient reporting.
A simplified database table holds all required financial information and uses the data processing power of SAP HANA to help ensure real-time and accurate reporting. This feature also eliminates the need for batch jobs and data replication in other systems, such as business intelligence.

Accelerated financial close.
With SAP S/4 HANA Finance, CFOs and their teams don’t nedd to worry about spending nights and weekends to ensure the timely closing of monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annual financial closes. The financial closing process is significantly improved, and the instant visibility of P&L (profit and loss) ensures business decisions can be made quickly, based on emerging sales and financial trends.

Integrated business planning
A Microsoft Excel-based interface significantly reduces the entire financial planning process by transferring financial data such as cost center, profit center, internal order and P&L planning from Excel into ECC for real-time reporting and to make informed business decisions.

New asset accounting.
The new asset accounting component of SAP S/4 HANA Finance makes it possible to manage parallel valuation of assets using the ledger and accounts approaches. It is no longer necessary to record depreciation areas. All systems’ postings are also now real-time across all valuations.

Cash management.
Replacing the cash and liquidity management component, the cash management feature manages bank account management, short-term cash position and liquidity forecast reports, and real-time liquidity planning, thereby allowing for tighter cash management for an optimized working capital.

Financials reporting.
This feature replaces many of SAP’s traditional drill-down reports that are not only notoriously slow, but that also do not dive deep enough to provide in-depth analytics on important financial key performance indicators.