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New users have traditionally struggled to understand the way SAP separates Financial Accounting and Management Accounting where most legacy systems see the two as one. While it’s easy enough to understand how a payroll account flows from the profit and loss statement into cost center accounting because the account information stays the same, the situation becomes more challenging as a revenue account flows into profitability analysis and is transformed into a value field, or a cost of goods sold account becomes multiple value fields depending on the cost components involved. In its latest product release, SAP is bringing the two worlds closer together.
Over the next few weeks, we will share portions of the transcript from Janet Salmon's plenary session at the next Controlling conference, Janet explores how SAP is addressing these issues with its new product SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA, part of SAP Simple Finance.
SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA Part II
SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA Part III
Additionally, she delves into how the requirements for internal and external reporting are converging and how this convergence impacts SAP Controlling.
Controlling and Finance are going closer together. CO, is it going away? This great community of, "What is Controlling? Why are we working in Controlling?" You're going to be more important than ever before. This really is where, new finance is starting to happen. I'm going to walk you through, what the new technology enables us to do. How it enables us to go back and rebuild the software that we originally built, 20 years ago. I'm extremely excited today as well with a brand new book out. It’s called SAP HANA for ERP Financials. I worked with Ulrich Schlüter on the book.
What I'm going to talk about today is first of all, the vision. What is SAP Accounting based powered by SAP HANA? What's behind it? Why are we doing it? Then, some of the specifics. What does it allow us to do, that we couldn't do 20 years ago? What were the compromises that we had to build, in terms of software design? What does it hopefully allow me to do? I'll talk about some of the customers that I've been working with and what they're trying to do.How they're using this, to drive their new approach to accounting?
I know I've got a lot of SAP CO-PA people out there. I'm going to talk also about what changes it will imply for CO-PA. Things that are actually in the system today, but maybe aren't being used to the best of their ability. Finally, work in process; some of those type of reports. How we're changing the period flows. Again, we're not changing how you do variance calculation, we're not changing how you calculate working process, but we are changing the technology behind it, to make it faster.
What are we doing; SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA? As I say, it's gone through various names when we started working on it, it was Simplified Finance. Then it became Financials powered by HANA, then Smart Accounting. Then, SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA. If you look at some of our marketing materials, this is part of the biggest solution called SAP Simple Finance. It is actually made up of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA, SAP Cash Management and Integrated Business Planning.
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Janet Salmon is the Chief Product Owner for Management Accounting at SAP AG. Janet is known to many SAP Financials professionals for her writings on Controlling and related subjects in SAP Financials Expert. She recently published her first book for SAP PRESS Controlling with SAP – Practical Guide. Janet has overseen many SAP Controlling functionality product developments both as a Product and Solution Manager. Most recently she spearheaded changes to the user interfaces within Controlling and data transfer from Controlling to SAP HANA.
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