This blog provides you with the latest and greatest innovations that our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release has in store for you in the area of Sales. To name just a few highlights:
- Order-to-Cash Dashboard for sales and service
- Customer Returns Dashboard
- Create new sales orders through spreadsheet upload
- Sales scheduling agreements involving external service agents
- Automatic notification for expiring sales contracts
- Schedule creation of preliminary billing documents
- Ability to analyze price elements of billing items
- and more.
In detail, this blog covers the following highlights:
- Order-to-Cash Dashboard for sales and service
- Create new sales orders through spreadsheet upload
Order-to-Cash Dashboard for Sales and Service
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 we introduced
SAP Analytics Cloud embedded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Business users will benefit from
pre-built dashboards (aka
stories) embedded to support real-time decision-making within different business processes. The dashboards are fully embedded into SAP S/4HANA Cloud user experience which, for example, allows for intent-based navigation. In addition, they offer the business user flexibility through the adjustment of filters, prompts, or drill states, but also by saving navigation states in screen variants. Starting with the 1911 release in the LoB Finance, we shipped with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 two new dashboards for Sales and Service:
- Order-to-Cash Dashboard for Sales and Service
- Customer Returns Dashboard
With this new
Order-to-Cash Dashboard for Sales and Service, you have now direct access to SAP S/4HANA Cloud data based on live connectivity and the integration into SAP Fiori launchpad, integrated into SAP S/4HANA Cloud role and screen variant management.
The dashboard offers significant key performance indicators such as sales volume, open sales orders, open deliveries, incoming sales orders, and sales cost, as well as comprehensive key figures from service, such as incoming service orders and open service orders.

Picture 1: Order to Cash Dashboard
This new ready-to-use, pre-configured Order-to-Cash Dashboard visualizes real-time insights into the sales process for executives and senior management. The dashboard also provides insights into the after-sales process with additional service key figures. This gives sales managers a comprehensive picture of the order to cash process and helps improve customer satisfaction as well as customer-oriented selling.
Key features (see Picture 1)
1: Switch between the three analytical pages: Sales Volume, Profit Margin, and Open Orders
2: Switch between different dimensions, such as sales organization, sold-to party, or product. Here you can also access the Explorer mode. The explorer mode allows users to add new dimensions and new values to the charts. You can save the explorer view in
My Views
3: Switch between bottom or top mode
4: Page filters, such as billing date, sales office, or customer group help to analyze the right data. Each page contains page filters that apply to the whole page. The time range filter is set as
Current Month by default. You can change it to the
Current Quarter or
Current Year. (Current month/quarter/year is calculated to the current date).
5: Significant key figures at a glance
Note 1: Stories/dashboards (SAP S/4HANA data only) are shipped via SAP Analytics Cloud Content Repository. The standard delivery can be used as templates, and this allows customers to copy and adapt or create their own stories.
The dashboard offers significant key performance indicators such as
- Sales Volume: Gain a real-time overview of sales volume by calendar month/quarter and sales organization, top customers, open sales orders by sales org, customer, customer group, material, and material group.
- Profit Margin: Compare sales volume and profit margin over time and by the sales organization. Analyze top customers by sales volume, profit margin, and net sales cost. Check your pricing strategies and monitor the costs.
- Incoming Orders: The Incoming Orders page combines sales and service key figures. It provides sales managers with a single view of the incoming workload and pending workload for both sales and service. Sales managers can monitor key figures, such as incoming sales orders and incoming service orders at a glance, and draw conclusions from the data. This also provides insights into the after-sales process, which helps to improve customer satisfaction and customer-oriented selling.

Picture 2: See offline demo on YouTube. Click here
Note 2: The key figures are calculated based on items that are part of business objects, for example, invoice items in customer invoices, or credit memo items in credit memos. However, this can also be mixed, for example, credit memo items can be part of invoices but still contribute to the Credit Memos key figure.
In the table below, you find an overview concerning the key figures delivered with the new
Order-to-Cash Dashboard for Sales and Service:
Key Figure |
Description |
Sales Volume |
The total invoiced sales achieved during a specified period.
This is based on invoice items or debit memo items (debits) that have not been canceled. |
Credit Memos |
The total amount of credit memos during a specified period. This is based on credit memo items (credits) that have not been canceled. |
Cancellations |
The total amount of invoices that have been canceled during a specified period. This is based on customer invoices that have been canceled. Cancellation documents are not considered at all. |
Profit Margin |
Sales volume minus costs |
Profit Margin Ratio |
Profit margin divided by sales volume |
Net Sales Cost |
Costs of sales volume minus costs of credit memos |
Incoming Sales Orders |
Orders which are relevant for billing or delivery, but which have not yet been processed |
Incoming Service Orders |
Service orders that have been created in a certain month |
Open Sales Orders |
Confirmed sales orders for which a delivery document has not yet been created in the period of the planned billing date (goods issue date). In this case, the net amount of the confirmed schedule lines is shown.
In the case of unconfirmed or partially unconfirmed sales orders, the net amount of the not yet confirmed requested schedule line is shown, and the billing date defines the analysis period, for example, month, in which the schedule line is displayed. |
Open Service Orders |
Service orders that don't have the status Completed n a certain month |
Create new sales orders through spreadsheet upload
With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 release, we deliver the first version of the
new SAP Fiori app “Create Sales Orders” (see my blog related to this Innovation here). Now with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release, we improve and increase sales force efficiency with a new option to
create sales orders by uploading spreadsheets with the required data. You can use this process when creating sales orders as a result of mass upload capabilities.
Business background: you regularly receive orders maintained in XLSX files. As sales orders are fundamental to any inventory and order management system, sales order should be entered into your system as soon as possible. You have now to create sales orders based on the data maintained in these XLSX files, and you need to manually enter the order data and create them one by one in the
Create Sales Orders app.
With the new
SAP Fiori app “Import Sales Orders”, you can batch-create sales orders directly from XLSX spreadsheet files. After an order data file is uploaded, the system automatically creates sales orders, thereby reducing manual workload and enhancing work efficiency for internal sales reps.

Picture 3: Offline demo on YouTube. Click here
Note 3: The sales order fields provided in this app do not suffice for creating sales orders with a billing plan or for one-time customers. If you have created these sales orders using the app, you must make order data complete later in the “Change Sales Orders - VA02” app.
Note 4: Technically, the import of sales orders requires field names that uniquely identify sales order fields. Currently, only a limited number of order fields are available for import. You can find their field names in the template
Key process:
1: Fill in Order Data in a Template-based File
We recommend that you download the standard template before importing sales orders. This template provides a list of sales order fields that are either required or optional for importing sales orders. You can add optional fields as needed in the order datasheet of the template. For details, refer to the instructions in the template.

Picture 4: Import Sales Orders app – Download Template
This sheet provides a list of sales order fields that are either required (marked with an asterisk) or optional. You can add optional fields to the "Order Data" sheet as needed.
Note 5: If you want to use your own XLSX file, instead of the template, to import sales orders, you have to adapt your own XLSX File with the technical names (the basis for sales order import) provided in the standard template.
2: Preview Order Data
After filling in order data and uploading your file, you can preview the order data, including header and item details.
If your file contains missing or invalid information, a preview is not possible. Revise your file by referring to the message displayed before attempting to reupload. Generally, you need to pay attention to missing or invalid information at three levels: Column-level, Row-level, and Cell-level.
3: Import Order Data
After you have verified the data integrity and validity of the file, you can import sales orders from your preview page. It may take some time before the order creation is completed. You can navigate to the import history to query the order creation status.

Picture 5: Import Sales Orders app – Create sales orders from your file
4: Track Order Data import history
You can track the history of sales order imports in the system, including order creation time, order creation status, the application log, and other information about each import
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
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