Over the last couple of years, we have been talking to many finance professionals across the world. And everyone is – at least - thinking about finance transformation … and how to ensure finance can answer the increasing and changing expectations from the business.
We are focused to support finance professionals to solve their most burning challenges as quickly, easily and as efficiently as possible. To do that as effectively as possible we firstly built the technical foundation to remove the limiting technical factors (see
this blog to learn more). Based on this foundation, we are able to harvest the benefits and build the most powerful business applications.
With the SAP S/4HANA 1909 Release we now present the next leapfrog with game changing capabilities: While we are adding more components to move forward to an intelligent finance organization, we are at the same time still taking care of the core finance functions: For example the fulfilment of new regulations, increasing process efficiency and compliance with automated processes and integrity checks as well as more efficient core processes.
While for SAP S/4HANA Cloud many of these new capabilities are already available through the quarterly releases – with the SAP S/4HANA 1909 release we are adding numerous new capabilities in one large step.
To make it easy to learn more about the new financial benefits we prepared a series of videos for you – thanks a lot for your tremendous feedback for the
videos of the 1809 release!
But let’s highlight a few examples of the new release first:
The Financial closing process
SAP is convinced that in the long run, a continuous closing process, both on entity and group level, will be highly beneficial for organizations. Not just in terms of an increased process efficiency, but from a steering perspective as well.
To give you deeper insight the new functions we created separate videos for the
advanced financial closing solution as well as the
Group Reporting solution and how they are evolving in the context of the 1909 release.
Receivables Management
In this area, the added value of specific cloud applications like Cloud for Credit Integration, Cloud for Customer Payments and Cloud for Digital Payments not only decrease the cost of the invoice to cash process through the support of self-service scenarios and new payment methods, but also have a risk limiting aspect, ensuring organizations get better forward looking insights regarding the ability of business partners to keep their commitments.
Treasury Management
Key for the Treasurer is to have Improved insights in the cash situation and more broadly the overall treasury situation. Therefore, we focused on enhancements in the area of SAP Treasury and Risk Management - discover the enhancements on an operational level – for example highlighting the evolution regarding trading platform integration – but also the evolution on the level of treasury reporting… and planning.
Analytics
Let’s have a look on the overall planning and broader analytics strategy of SAP - here, we make a deep dive into the power of an increased integration of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud. This unique combination enables finance professionals to answer the vastly increasing expectation of business leaders. Finance can strengthen its position as the key partner supplying detailed and real-time insights for fact-based decision making - including the ability to simulate different forward-looking business scenarios.
With the increasing pace the digital economy is changing, the need for better decisions continues to grow. Getting better, more detailed and faster insights into the financial performance of today, as well as improved forward-looking capabilities is the second large pillar which is being worked on.
Based on the universal journal and the single source of truth the unique combination of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud provides a single environment providing actionable insights to businesses.
Universal Allocation
While the universal journal is mostly mentioned in the context of analytics, it also is the basis to harmonize and simplify business processes. An interesting example of this is the new Universal Allocation functionality. In a separate video we illustrate how this improves the operational setup and execution of allocations, as well as the transparency and traceability of costs across the organization.
Contract and Lease Management
There are three different levels of change an organization can adopt around leasing: compliance with the topic, optimization of the leasing portfolio and finally, transforming leasing operations. Learn from new enhancements in the Contract and Lease Management helping users to simplifying lease processing and reporting with help of the integrated SAP Analytics Cloud solution.
SAP S/4HANA 1909 Finance Videos:
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Highlights for Finance and Risk Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – SAP Contract and Lease Management Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – SAP Receivables Management Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – SAP Treasury Management Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Orchestrating an Accelerated Financial Close Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Driver-based Planning with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Margin Analysis with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and On Premise Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Universal Allocation in SAP S/4HANA Watch here
SAP S/4HANA 1909 – Embedded Analytics - Integrating SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud Watch here
If you want to learn more about the SAP S/4HANA 1909 Release please have a look on
Sven Denecken’s blog.
If you want to learn more about SAP S/4HANA for finance professionals visit
https://sap.com/finance
