SAP S/4HANA Q&A with Janet Salmon

Janet Salmon, Chief Product Owner for Management Accounting at SAP AG, presented a webinar to the SAP Controlling Community on a sneak peek of her Controlling 2016 plenary session SAP S/4HANA - Let's Get Under the Covers (watch it here). Janet has addressed the Q&A in this blog post that we weren't able to cover due to time constraints in the webinar.

Simply put, what is the difference between Simple Finance and S/4 Hana Finance?
SAP S/4HANA Finance was previously known as SAP Simple Finance. These two product names are synonymous. As of release 1605, SAP S/4HANA Finance will be the only official product name for both the 1503 and 1605 releases.

Nonetheless, SAP Simple Finance will still be used in the documentation of release 1503, as a retroactive update of this documentation is not planned. Find out more via these links:
http://help.sap.com/sfin
watch it here

Can you have different functional currencies for the same company code in a parallel ledger?
All documents are recorded in company code currency (currency type 10) and group currency (currency type 30). In addition you can add further currencies by making the appropriate ledger settings.

In traditional SAP ERP you could use three currencies in FI and two in CO. In SAP Simple Finance 1503, the three currencies remain (and you could already configure one as a functional currency) but in SAP S/4 HANA Finance the currency settings are extended, so that in 1602 you have the option to use eight additional currency fields per ledger and use one of these currency fields to accommodate a functional currency. In S/4 HANA Finance 1605 you have the option to include group valuation (currency types 31 or 11) and profit center valuation (currency types 32 or 12) via these currency fields (or add extra ledgers for the group/profit center views).

Is WebDynpro required?
Yes, for certain applications (e.g. master data in CO, account data in FI, some reporting apps)

If I am not on the New GL do I have to implement the New GL before moving to HANA. Do I have I have to install Unicode?
If you are not already on New GL, the migration to S/4 HANA Finance will “enrich” your existing documents to derive profit centers, functional areas, segments, and so on giving you the multidimensionality of new GL (formerly the new GL scenarios). The migration will also merge the P&L accounts and cost elements meaning that you no longer need the reconciliation ledger or realtime integration via new GL. This means that the P&L contains all reporting dimensions and is structured by account/cost element.

At the time of writing the migration cannot activate an additional ledger or document splitting retrospectively, so if these are critical to your project, you should first do a migration to new GL and then to S/4 HANA. Alternatively, you can migrate to SAP S/4 HANA Finance now and continue to use the account approach and have only the P&L by profit center and move to the ledger approach and/or document splitting in the future, when SAP offers the appropriate toolsets for this part of the migration.

I am under the impression that Central Finance is still in development and not yet available. Is that correct and when would it be available with consolidatons etal.
Central Finance was released with SAP S/4 HANA 1503, but obviously features are being added with every subsequent release. The next wave of development focuses on a real-time consolidation option that takes the data in the universal journal as the starting point for a consolidated group close.

Does the ACDOCA table take the place of FAGLFLEXA/COSS/COSP??
Yes for actual costs (value type 04) but the totals tables are still used for other value types, such as planned costs, target costs, and so on.

Are there cost component splits in accounting-based CO-PA?
The cost component split for the standard costs is used to update sub-accounts when the cost of goods sold is posted in account-based CO-PA. At the time of writing an update of the cost component split using the actual costs determined via a costing run in the material ledger is not possible – instead the actual costs will be updated to a single COGS account.

How would our WRICEFs (custom objects) will get migrated to work with SFin? Do we need to update all our custom reports to change table lookups?
READ statements will continue to work since we provide views that represent the eliminated tables (COSP, COSS, COEP, etc). You will have to check your custom code for WRITE, UPDATE, DELETE statements since the tables are now virtual. Follow the instructions in SAP Note 1976487.

If we decide to use Central Finance on a separate instance, is there any impact to WRICEFs in the existing SAP systems?
No, your WRICEFs would continue to run. You will need to implement a small amount of code on the local system to ensure connectivity with Central Finance.

Do the legacy FI/CO tables (BKPF, BSEG, COBK..) still exist?

Yes. We still use BSEG for open item management in FI-AP and FI-AR.