SAP S/4HANA Finance


What is SAP S/4HANA Finance?

Initially released in 2014, SAP S/4HANA Finance is the core financial solution for SAP customers, designed to leverage the SAP Fiori user interface and in-memory computing power of HANA. Previously referred to as SAP Simple Finance and SAP ERP Financials, SAP S/4HANA Finance provides multiple innovations, such as the Universal Journal single source of truth, allowing organizations to streamline financial processes, with real-time updates and reporting, across a simplified data model for storing financial and managerial accounting information.

What is SAP S/4HANA Finance?

Initially released in 2014, SAP S/4HANA Finance is the core financial solution for SAP customers, designed to leverage the SAP Fiori user interface and in-memory computing power of HANA. Previously referred to as SAP Simple Finance and SAP ERP Financials, SAP S/4HANA Finance provides multiple innovations, such as the Universal Journal single source of truth, allowing organizations to streamline financial processes, with real-time updates and reporting, across a simplified data model for storing financial and managerial accounting information.

Many SAP ERP customers utilize SAP S/4HANA to manage core business functions that enable timely and accurate financial operations and reporting, such as accounting and finance, financial planning and analysis, financial risk management, and risk and compliance management. SAP S/4HANA Finance is a powerful and versatile system that can be deployed in multiple ways to suit your organization’s needs.

Key features of SAP S/4HANA Finance include:

  • Unified real-time data model for storing all finance-related information
  • Enhanced financial closing capability
  • Centralization of account payables and account receivables
  • Predictive accounting
  • Embedded analytics

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders 

Start thinking about your SAP S/4HANA Finance journey now. In 2027, SAP expects to cease all new development for the core ERP and sunset support, requiring organizations to transition to S/4HANA Finance. Organizations that have yet to make the move to SAP S/4HANA Finance need to begin planning and develop a viable roadmap or risk falling behind their peers.

Reduce compliance risks by properly archiving financial information prior to SAP S/4HANA Finance transition. The size of your financial database directly impacts both the complexity and cost, which often leads to long timelines for moving everything over as well potential compliance risks that need addressing before they can be done. Achieve a high level of data protection by archiving critical financial information before it impacts performance, cost, or availability. Evaluate requirements for data cleanup to transfer historical data securely.

Leverage Central Finance in transition to SAP S/4HANA Finance as an opportunity to optimize core finance functions.Consolidating data from multiple sources and creating a single summary of the information is difficult. Central Finance can make this process easier, as it simplifies everything into one easily accessible place for greater visibility. Organizations can empower SAP S/4HANA Finance modules, applications, and extensions end-to-end with more accessible financial information.

94 results

  1. Revolutionizing and Modernizing your Financial Processes with SAP S/4HANA Finance

    Published: 03/February/2020

    Reading time: 2 mins

    A former accountant himself, Paul Ovigele, SAP Consultant and Founder and CEO of ERPfixers, understands this group’s mindset. “You can’t just hand an accountant a shiny new thing like SAP S/4HANA Finance and expect them to get excited. They want to get to the bottom of exactly what the benefits are and whether the benefits…

  2. Three Questions to Help You Understand Current Finance Strategy for Moving to the Cloud

    Published: 15/January/2020

    Reading time: 2 mins

    In Q4 of 2019, SAPinsider surveyed 102 members of our audience for an upcoming report, “Streamlining Financial Processes in the Cloud,” to understand their current finance strategy, whether that involves cloud-native solutions, and how they plan on meeting their strategic needs and objectives. We found that the majority (54%) ran at least one financial solution…

  3. It’s Time for Finance to Captain the Boat

    Published: 04/December/2019

    Reading time: 15 mins

    Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a top financial concern for SAP customers, according to a recent SAPinsider benchmark report, “SAP S/4HANA Finance: State of the Market,” where more than 400 individuals across all lines of business from nearly 150 companies were surveyed regarding their strategy for SAP S/4HANA Finance. However, many organizations are still…

  4. The Present and Future of Financial Planning and Analysis

    Published: 03/December/2019

    Reading time: 5 mins

      Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals benefit from understanding new practices that make their peers successful. SAPinsider’s research report on Assessing Intelligent Automation in Finance examines how leaders are choreographing their success in the dance between technology vision and business pragmatism. Combined with the FP&A elements of our Deploying SAP S/4HANA research, some interesting…

  5. Access Your Financial Content Bundle

    Published: 01/October/2019

    Reading time: 1 min

    Access to all of the resources in this Financials Content Bundle. Register below to gain the latest insights with SAP Financials tutorials, tips and training content from SAP Experts.

  6. SAPinsider Financials Collection

    Published: 01/October/2019

    Reading time: 1 min

    The top 8 articles to help you better drive accounting, controlling and planning and prepare for SAP S/4HANA.

  7. What Business Users Can Expect from the New Functionality in SAP S/4HANA Finance

    Published: 25/July/2019

    Reading time: 13 mins

    As SAP customers start to adopt SAP S/4HANA Finance, they want to know how the new solution differs from their current SAP ECC implementation and what new capabilities it presents. This article will help to illuminate how these SAP S/4HANA Finance innovations provide business users more efficiency and automation, which in turn allows finance and…

  8. Key Considerations for Migrating Your SAP Finance Operations to SAP S/4HANA

    Published: 24/July/2019

    Reading time: 3 mins

    Many SAP customers are voicing apprehension about migrating their finance operations to SAP S/4HANA, not sure of what is in store for them and how best to prepare for the shift. This article focuses on two major considerations for SAP customers making the move: implementing the material ledger and moving to account-based profitability analysis. As…

  9. Technical Guide: Add Currencies using S/4HANA Finance 1809

    Published: 25/October/2018

    Reading time: 10 mins

    Traditionally, once you have gone live in a production system, the SAP system gives you a warning message (Figure 1) when you try to add a currency in the ledgers definition, and you then need SAP System Landscape Optimization (SLO) service for such a change in your currency setup. Figure 1 – Issue when adding…

  10. sap s4hana finance 1610 image

    SAP S/4HANA Finance 1610

    Published: 11/October/2018

    Reading time: 10 mins

    SAP S/4HANA Finance 1610 provides users with the flexibility of using two main currencies plus eight freely definable currencies. The translation of the user-defined currencies, whether real time or not, is based on the currency configuration completed after executing transaction code FINSC_LEDGER. The eight freely definable currencies allowed by SAP S/4HANA Finance 1610 are available…