How To Design For Margin Analysis In SAP

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SAP S/4HANA was responsible for bringing profitability analysis within Universal Journal. Market analysis by segment became available under Ultimate Journal, making it a valuable method of reporting for both management and financial accounting departments. For a business to truly utilize Universal Journal’s benefits, it must implement margin analysis. SAP ERP doesn't support margin analysis, but SAP recommends that users utilize it in SAP S/4HANA. The cloud edition of SAP S/4HANA requires a business to use margin analysis for its profitability reporting. There are several paradigms for reporting in SAP S/4HANA, which we will explore here.

Traditional Reports

These reports are the standard fare for SAP users but don’t support most modern functions like additional currencies or parallel ledgers. These traditional reports using the SAP HANA database will offer faster run time and more efficient production.

Web DynPro for ABAP-Based Reporting

Web DynPro is utilized as the framework for building ABAP applications. Within Web DynPro are development tools that speed up prototyping and production of interactive web-based front-ends. From it, coders can develop both applications and reports tied directly to data within the SAP S/4HANA database.

SAP Fiori/SAPUI5

Fiori is primarily used in developing user interfaces using the SAPUI5 architecture. The Framework comes with a handful of applications already usable out of the box, including analytics and reporting apps.

SAP Analytics Cloud Reporting

SAP Analytics Cloud is the SAP solution for planning, analysis, and smart predictions based on existing data. Designed as an SaaS, users can use either the embedded SAP Analytics cloud or the stand-alone version. Analytics Cloud uses SAP Fiori as an intermediary to expose data, ensuring that each client's data is isolated from each other client. It develops its reporting using ABAP core data services (CDS) views, which populate based on the real-time changes within the database.

SAP Lumira Reporting

Based on SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), this tool was initially envisioned as the inheritor of the SAP Business Explorer (BEx) Web App Designer. It develops reports based on a presentation-first (or WYSIWYG) system. Its primary market was users without core ABAP or web design skills. Many of the base SAP reports were built using SAP Lumira, but it remains an optional design tool that developers can use.

SAP BW/4HANA Reporting

The natural successor to SAP BW, SAP BW/4HANA, uses much of the same data as underlying apps to generate reports. There's no need for data replication and storage, making a more efficient system overall.

Semantics Tags

One of the innovative new features you get with SAP S/4HANA is the ability to use semantics tags as financial delineators. These tags are, in reality, financial data objects that can simplify or enhance financial statement items by categorizing them. Semantics tags make for ease of querying, and if any updates are to be done to these tags, all queries containing them will be updated. It's crucial to remember that the pre-delivered SAP tags should never be changed or edited in any way. Organizations can define their own tags pertaining to their data.

That's all on this short breakdown of using SAP S/4HANA for margin analysis and the different types of reporting available to you. Please follow my profile justinsingh for more on this topic. I welcome any questions in the comments below. For more information check out the SAP S/4HANA Topic Page!