What makes SAP Simple Finance a High ROI Investment?

In today’s world of growing operational complexities, CFOs face a tough time getting real-time information to enable simulation of business scenarios and make well-informed decisions while managing compliance and risks. ERPs are complicated and finance users struggle with time-extensive planning and forecasting processes, closing cycles, and data reconciliation. To keep pace in the competitive world, there is an urgent need to revolutionize how finance processes are executed, coupled with efficient information delivery methods. SAP provides an innovative approach to overcome these challenges and resolve issues in financial operations. SAP has rebuilt its solution, leveraging the massive power of HANA, known as S/4HANA Finance. This is aimed at making the finance operations highly simplified and greatly responsive to business needs. It provides endless chances to reimagine, renew, and reinvent business processes and transforming an organization’s financial processes into a rejuvenating journey.

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What is S/4HANA Finance?

S/4HANA Finance is the latest version of SAP Finance which is a holistic finance solution, rebuilt on the HANA platform, harnessing the power of HANA. It offers real-time information and inferred insights to CFOs for taking decisions and enables finance users to execute processing more efficiently. It removes limitations and constraints due to the current database in-turn non-disruptively transforming a financial system into line item-based simple finance. This is further simplified by a user-friendly interface, utilizing the HTML5-based Fiori application.

Highly innovative changes made to the Finance Solution include:

• An integrated view of Financial Data: The Financial Data model has undergone a sea change and is architected to offer a highly-integrated view of all the financial operations, which includes external reporting, assets, profitability analysis, management reporting, etc. This brings in a great degree of flexibility in operations and reporting. Material Ledger Data Model is simplified to offer flexibility to the users.

• Real-Time Financial Accounting: Finance business processes are rejigged to offer real-time and accelerated reporting with rapid closing processes like allocation of common cost and depreciation. Fixed Asset Accounting is structured to offer online parallel reporting for various accounting principles. The current material valuation done at the material level is substituted with material ledger providing the flexibility to do parallel valuation on-line. New Asset Accounting and Material Ledger are made compulsory.

• Comprehensively Manage Cash and Liquidity: Cash and Liquidity Management is the foundation of treasury operations. KPI-driven Cash and Liquidity reports are made available in real-time, which provides flexibility to manage cash operations and with real-time insights into information to make well-informed decisions.
• Embedded Integrated Business Planning: Embedded Integrated Planning Solution offers real-time consolidation with Master Data and Actual Data. This can be used to do planning in a highly efficient and accelerated manner. This brings simplicity and eliminates the unnecessary complexity of existing solutions.
• Enterprise Risk Management: Enterprise Risk Management Solution aids in proactively managing both enterprise compliance and risk. It offers central data storage and data model, spanning an end-to-end audit process with a risk-based approach. This gives users insights into risks and frauds.
• User experience: User experience is highly improved utilizing the HTML5 Fiori application. The new user interface is developed for all the financial transactions, providing users with convenience, simplicity, and a highly customized view of their data.

KPI-driven dashboards which are analytical and real-time give early insights into information enabling informed decisions and respond to the complexities proactively as opposed to working in a reactive mode. S/4HANA has an in-built ability to use prediction, analysis and simulation to assess the financial ramifications of strategic business options. Standard analytical dashboards are made available for payable management, receivable management, closing operations, costing operations, cash and liquidity management and a whole lot more.

S/4HANA Simple Finance Can Transform Finance Operations

The following three approaches can be used to achieve transformation and overcome business challenges:

#1 – Renew

Business processes are renewed and rebuilt by SAP as a standard deliverable of S/4HANA Finance. The pre-existing pain-points in business processes are recognized in turn optimizing processes and weeding out the existing constraints. This is made possible by leveraging the enhanced abilities of HANA. For example- integrated Finance and Controlling processes, accelerated closing operations, account-based CO-PA integrated with core finance transactions, inventory valuation using the material ledger, intercompany reconciliation on-the-fly, new asset accounting enabling real-time multi-GAAP or (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) reporting, and a whole lot more.

#2 – Redesign

If the existing SAP-delivered process is unsuitable requiring enhancement and modifications, Finance users can redesign or improve their own processes and modify them to meet the particular business requirements, need for higher ease of operations and real-time information. For example- simultaneous analytics as business processes are executed like the adjustment of advance against invoice

#3 – Reinvent

This enables users to recognize white spaces in SAP and to develop industry-specific end-to-end solutions. For example pre-trade analytics for milestone billing for project business, treasury deals, and also the development of analytical dashboards and more.

This provides limitless opportunities for the transformation of finance operations leveraging the immense power of HANA.

The Final Word on SAP S/4HANA Simple Finance as an Investment

S/4HANA Finance has boldly opened new frontiers for addressable pain points and has transformed the scope of existing finance operations on a global scale. Being a whole lot more than just a cluster of the latest features, SAP S/4HANA pushes the limits for efficiency in Finance operations. With SAP’s vast experience in the financial space, Simple finance aids clients in re-designing and re-inventing finance solutions to take complete advantage of SAP HANA. The end result of such efforts is minimized complexity that finance departments face every day and a comprehensive assessment of the value of financial operations across the organization.

Enterprises rooted in finance are required to fully embrace the digital transformation sweeping up the global finance scene today to keep up with constantly evolving business models and needs providing decision-makers with nearly instantaneous insight. With SAP S/4HANA Finance, users can create a common view of all financial and operational data, and give flexible, easily consumable reporting, automation of processes enabling instant evaluation of the financial implications of business options. This, coupled with real-time analytics, prediction, and simulation, even a highly evolved user experience makes SAP S/4 Simple finance the last word in finance applications, making this a no-brainer for investing in the business through finance operations. High returns on investment are virtually guaranteed with Simple finance, benefiting individuals and organizations alike.

I hope that by now you have had an overview of SAP S/4 HANA Finance. Before you enroll in ZaranTech’s certification course on SAP S/4 HANA Finance, do check out the S4 HANA Finance demo:

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