SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud release 2102 (February 2021) brought forward exciting features for Finance-related business functions. There are six main areas of improvement, ranging from a new Finance Compliance Management solution to changes and updates in the management of Subscriptions, Revenue recognition and Predictive Accounting.
1. Assignment of Accounting Principles
Flexible assignment of accounting standards, such as IFRS or GAAP, is now possible thanks to the latest updates to the SAP S/4HANA technology stack. This means that we can now assign accounting principles to ledgers or combinations of ledgers and company codes.
2. Integrated Financial Planning
A brand-new Simulation Cockpit for Sales, Expense and Raw Material calculations that allows us to simulate different test scenarios with different KPIs and What-If Analysis. At the same time, there are new and rebuilt business story packages with ready-made content which you can see in action here.
3. Finance Compliance Management
The first release of the SAP Finance Compliance Management is now available with the most recent release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This solution allows us to identify and properly assess risk exposure at the organisation and business process level while giving you the tools to implement, monitor and document compliance checks in the system.
4. Solution Order Management
Subscriptions for consumption-based businesses have been added to the Solution Order Management tool. Products and services can be added to the same order, consisting of physical products and one-time, recurring or consumption-based services.
5. Revenue Recognition for Project-Based Sales and Services
SAP is leveraging real-time data and the Universal Journal in the new project billing solution by providing a new app that monitors the Work-In-Progress details for project-based services. This enables us to get even more granularity in reports for customer projects, thus ensuring we can manage projects more effectively and efficiently.
6. Predictive Accounting in Service Contracts
SAP’s intelligent ERP and real-time data are here to help you predict the future. The business scope of Predictive Accounting has been expanded with the latest S/4HANA release thanks to improvements to the management of Service Contracts. Journal Updates can be predicted as soon as a service contract is released. These entries would provide expected values in a prediction ledger. This allows us to review balance sheets and income statements based on predictive accounting data.
What’s Next?
There are many more features and improvements that were implemented with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2102 in Finance and other related business process areas. SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 was released earlier this month, so we are now reviewing the new changes and updates. You can expect a new blog post from us on the highlights of the 2105 release in the coming weeks.
