SAP AR AP

SAP AR AP: An Overview and Key Considerations

What Is SAP AR AP?

SAP AR AP represents the accounts receivable and accounts payable sub-module components of the SAP Financial (FI) module and helps maintain financial relationships with vendors and customers, as well as manage their accounting data. The SAP accounts receivable sub-module (FI-AR) handles customer invoices, approvals, and incoming payments, enabling organizations to access reports and forecasting features for tracking customer outstanding balances. The SAP accounts payments sub-module (FI-AP) manages vendor invoices, approvals, and outgoing payments to provide organizations with the necessary information for tracking outstanding balances belonging to vendors.

SAP AR AP: An Overview and Key Considerations

What Is SAP AR AP?

SAP AR AP represents the accounts receivable and accounts payable sub-module components of the SAP Financial (FI) module and helps maintain financial relationships with vendors and customers, as well as manage their accounting data. The SAP accounts receivable sub-module (FI-AR) handles customer invoices, approvals, and incoming payments, enabling organizations to access reports and forecasting features for tracking customer outstanding balances. The SAP accounts payments sub-module (FI-AP) manages vendor invoices, approvals, and outgoing payments to provide organizations with the necessary information for tracking outstanding balances belonging to vendors.

SAP AR AP plays a significant role in providing organizations with end-to-end financial management. Finance and accounting teams can streamline their financial processes and improve their overall financial visibility by preventing duplicate inter-company AR/AP postings.

Additional key benefits for SAP AR AP end-users include:

• Improved cash flow
• Better budgeting and forecasting capabilities
• Enhanced decision-making capabilities
• Improved customer service
• Streamlined operations.

Key Considerations  

Consider options to enhance SAP AR AP capabilities with a move to SAP S/4HANA. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, enabled by in-memory processing and simplified SAP Fiori interfaces, offers extended SAP AR/AP functionality. As a result, organizations can expect improved performance and faster response times when executing financial transactions, with all postings across the SAP AR AP function updating to the SAP General Ledger (FI-GL).

Leverage SAP AR AP best practices to streamline operational processes. The SAP Best Practices Explorer provides standardized essential process flows to help lower the cost of operations and deliver business benefits across multiple geographies, divisions, subsidiaries, and ledgers with global and country-specific content. For example, organizations can realize cost savings by centralizing account receivables and account payables processing, allowing finance and accounting managers to enforce governance and common standards, supporting compliance efforts.

Enable operational efficiencies with SAP AR AP automation. Organizations can save time and money by reducing the workload of finance and accounting teams when AR/AP automation is improved. In addition, core business functions, such as order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes, are more efficient when organizations significantly reduce the effort required for manual approvals with automation.