Fiori user interface, quarterly releases, and
bespoke programming is not possible as you
June 27, 2017
Finance
Differences in
SAP S/4HANA
Oona Flanagan  functionality, but mostly the Fiori apps are
 ERPfixers Blog Series
Introduction
This article covers some of the differences
between S/4HANA and previous versions of
SAP.  already available in later versions of ECC).
Simple Finance was the first part of the
Business Suite to be rewritten to run on
SAP’s new superfast in-memory HANA
database. Simple Logistics followed, and the
combined new product, with New GL and
New Asset Accounting as prerequisite,
became known as S/4HANA.
S/4HANA exists as the S/4HANA Cloud
which is a standardized Multi-Tenanted
Cloud (i.e. all customers share the same
software instance although the data is secure
and private). This comes with a mandatory
are sharing your system with others. There is
also the On-premise S/4HANA with greater
flexibility, freedom to customize as before,
and optional Fiori and annual releases.
The exact functionality will vary depending
on the release, and this article is mostly
based on S/4HANA 1610, which is the
October 2016 On-premise release, although
some of the functionality below may already
be available in the later enhancement packs
of ECC6. I have used print screens mainly
from the GUI to help users to compare the
quite similar.
A lot of the ECC6 functionality is still
available in S/4HANA in the SAP GUI;
sometimes transactions are enhanced and
easily recognized and both the old and new
co-exist (e.g. FAGLL03 and FAGLL03H),
and sometimes you are redirected to new
functionality automatically (e.g. FK01-
>BP). It seems where the letter H is added at
the end of the transaction, it tends to be a
new S/4HANA specific transaction, the
letter N has often been added to new
transactions anyway, including those
introduced with the New GL (and some are
The letter L at the end of some transactions
seems to allow posting to different ledgers
e.g. FB01 and FB01L as well as a lot of the
new asset transactions, but these are just
guidelines not strict rules.
Fiori
Described as the new User-Experience, Fiori
replaces most of the SAP GUI transactions,
resembling the more user-friendly
Smartphone apps instead of the traditional
SAP GUI menu structure. Fiori is available
on multiple devices i.e. desktops, phones,
tablets etc. Informative, interactive apps are
available so you can already see the number
of outstanding items, or account balances on
the face of the Fiori app before you click on
it to drilldown further, see Figure 1. Some
apps have graphs, calendars (e.g. leave
requests), pie charts etc. and the launch pad
can contain customized apps and also
personas transactions in the same style as
the Fiori apps.
Figure 1 Two Fiori Tiles
Ledgers and Currencies
In addition to the normal parallel ledgers
which were introduced with the New GL,
there are now Extension Ledgers (original
called appendix ledgers). The difference is
that with an additional parallel ledger,
postings are physically made to both the
leading ledger and the parallel ledger, with
only adjustments made to the parallel ledger,
whereas extension ledgers have to be linked
to a base ledger and only take delta postings.
Therefore, when you run a report for the
extension ledger it pulls in both the base
ledger and the extension ledger to show you
the complete picture. The extension ledgers
however cannot be used in asset accounting.
There are now 8 additional freely definable
currencies available, although they may not
all be available in other modules and a
conversion project would be required to
ensure historical data is dealt with
appropriately.
Data structure
HANA has the power to calculate on the fly,
which means that for financial transactions,
index tables such as BSIS, BSAS, BSID,
BSAD, BSIK, BSAK, BSIM, FAGLBSIS
and FAGLBSAS, as well as aggregate tables
such as GLT0, GLT3, FAGLFLEXT,
KNC1, LFC1, KNC3, LFC3, COSS, COSP
are no longer required and have been
removed.  FAGLFLEXA and some other
New GL tables are now obsolete and there
are also new customizing tables.
However, if you have your own ABAP
reports using these tables, don’t worry as
there are now Compatibility views with the
same name, which recalculate the same
values as the tables would have had,
allowing any bespoke programs reading the
information to continue to function. There
are new tools which you can run prior to
migration, which allow you to check which
of your bespoke programs are read only and
will continue to function and which need
rewriting. In any case you may find that
some of your bespoke programs are no
longer required because that functionality is
now available as standard, or that it will be
more efficient to rewrite them using the new
tables anyway.
Universal journal
This is the name of the enhanced financial
document in S/4HANA. A Universal
Journal is created whenever anything is
posted to Finance from any module and each
journal can be displayed as before using the
display document transaction FB03. Many
of the journal entry, invoice entry and other
posting transactions are still available in the
SAP GUI, so you can still for example use
FB50 or FB50L (by ledger) to post a
journal, although the Fiori equivalents are
more user-friendly. The Universal Journal is
the Single Source of Truth for finance,
Controlling and COPA, and includes all the
cost objects traditionally found in
Controlling such as cost centers, internal
orders and WBS elements as well as
columns for the standard CO-PA
characteristics and up to fifty additional
characteristics. See also the next section on
merging Finance and Controlling. New
reports are available, mainly in Fiori, but the
old Controlling reports continue to work
(using compatibility views), including those
for planning
To have only one field available in the
Universal Journal for both the GL account
and cost element numbers, the cost elements
are contained inside the GL account master
records. To achieve this, there are now four
types of GL account, instead of the previous
two, i.e. Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss -
see Figure 3.

ACDOCA is the name of the Finance

module’s important new S/4HANA table,
which is based on the Universal Journal line
items, containing all of the financial fields,
as well as a lot of information from other
modules. Figure 2 shows an extract of the
ACDOCA table showing some of the asset
and material ledger fields available.  If you select Primary or Secondary Costs as
Figure 3 GL Account Type
the GL account type, then on the Control
Data tab you will see Controlling Area
settings such as the cost element category
(see Figure 4). The dropdown options in
Figure 4 are based on choosing primary
costs as the GL account type. Categories
relating to secondary costs are available if
you choose the secondary costs GL account
type. Cost element groups are still available.

Figure 2 ACDOCA Table Showing Some of the

Fields

Single Source of Truth

Finance and Controlling are now merged,

getting rid of data redundancies and the need
for reconciliations, and making visible the
internal CO actual postings in FI as well.
The real-time FI-CO integration is also
obsolete and Controlling data is stored in the
Figure 4 Cost Element Category
new finance table ACDOCA. 
Default account assignments from the cost
elements are automatically migrated to the
OKB9 configuration transaction and
configuring cost object defaults in OKB9 is
the only option going forwards.

An additional column appears in

Transaction OB52 (opening and closing
periods) for postings from Controlling to
Finance, (although you still need OKP1 at Figure 6 Enhanced Search Functionality Settings
Controlling Area level), and you have the
option of selecting the posting period variant The enhanced search functionality can be
prior to entering the time interval screen. used in many places, for example in the
vendor line item report to find the vendor by
Account-based profitability analysis must be name (Figure 7), by vendor number (Figure
activated but you can still use costing-based 8) by postcode, country, search term or
profitability analysis in parallel.  Initially anything else available on that specific
realignment was not supported but this has enhanced search screen. If you search for
been brought in with release 1610. example for a material (Figure 9) you will
see different search options.  
Enhanced Search
 
If you click on the colored icon at the far
right of the top menu bar in the S/4HANA
GUI and choose options (see Figure 5), then
go to Interaction Design->Visualization 2
you can choose whether to use the enhanced
search or not, or only with a keyboard
shortcut (Ctrl + Shift + Q), see Figure 6. Figure 7 Enhanced Search Using Name

Figure 5 GUI Options Menu

Figure 8 Enhanced Search Using Vendor Number

Figure 9 Enhanced Search for Material

Vendors and Customers

Customers and vendors can only be

maintained using the Business Partner
functionality (of which there is of course a
Fiori equivalent) and if you try to use the old
codes e.g. FK01/2/3 or XK01/2/3 to
create/amend/display a vendor or FD01/2/3
and XD01/2/3 to create/amend display a
customer you will be redirected to
transaction BP. 
Figure 11 Business Partner Identification Tab

Many of the screens are fairly similar to the

old master data transactions, but a lot more
data is available and one Business Partner
may have roles in MM, SD, and FI.
Employees, banks and other contacts can
also be set up as Business Partners. Multiple
relationships can be specified and new time
dependent data is available for e.g. addresses
and bank data. See Figure 10 and Figure 11.
You will need to migrate your customers
and vendors to Business Partners as part of
the migration if you are not already using
them.
Figure 10 Business Partner Payment Tab
Figure 12 Business Partner Relationship contact
example
Line Item Reports
The old reports, such as FBL1N, FBL5N
and FAGLL03 still exist alongside FBL1H,
FBL5H and FAGLL03H which have
slightly different screens. The selection
screen is quite similar, although note that the
additional selections button (the red, green
and blue stripy one) now appears halfway
down the selection screen instead of at the
top and is labelled Restrictions. Once you
execute the report however, things look
somewhat different and the line items start
off summarized by period.

Figure 13 Transaction FBL1H

If you want to see the line items you need to
select the lines that you want to see and
click on the icon on the right call line item
report. This will take you to your normal
FBL1N screen.  In Figure 14,  I chose only
the last period, i.e. period 6 in 2017
containing one row, (the cleared payment
for the previous period). In Figure 15, I
chose period 12, 2017 to show the other
display setting in FBL1N. (to toggle
between the two, go to Settings-> Switch
List in the top menu in the line item display).
Figure 14 Vendor Line Item Display Called from
FBL1H
Figure 15 Vendor Line Item Display Called from
FBL1H
By clicking on the vendor number in the
body of the report, you will be redirected to
the vendor master data (held in the Business
Partner transaction) 
Credit Management
FSCM replaces the previous Accounts
Receivable credit management transactions
(e.g. F.28/F.31/F.32/F.33/FD32) and the
Sales transactions (VKM3/VKM5). If you
are not already familiar with FSCM, this
already used the Business Partner
functionality prior to S/4HANA and has
additional functionality, in areas such as
Credit Management, Collections
Management (including collection
worklists), Dispute Management. It also has
additional reporting and allows you to
import external credit information. 
Materials
The Material Ledger is mandatory (although
Actual Costing is still optional) and there are
also new tables for material documents
(MATDOC), a Cost of Goods Sold variance
split and no locking of tables. The material
number field is extended from 18 to 40
characters and this information is available
in the Universal Journal document, and
therefore the ACDOCA table for reporting
in finance. Note that the extended material
functionality can be switched off if for
example you have a multi-system landscape.
Global trade Services (GTS)
GTS replaces the foreign trade functionality
in Sales and Procurement. This allows the
pulling in of data from different systems,
and is extensively integrated with SD and
MM. 
Revenue Recognition
Only the new Revenue Accounting and
Reporting, which supports IFRS15, is
available in S/4HANA, i.e. the SD Revenue
and Recognition is no longer available.
LSMW  
The Legacy System Migration Workbench
is still available in S/4HANA, but it is not
recommended for migrations as it has not
been amended for the new data structures,
and some functionality is not available e.g.
transaction recordings cannot be made with
the Fiori transactions.  configuration for payments and bank
The Maintenance Planner tool has to be used
for a system conversion, which among other
things, checks add-ons, active business
functions and industry solutions to ensure
that they can be converted.
Central Finance
Central Finance is a new concept introduced
with S/4HANA. It allows users with a large
and distributed landscape to replicate both
SAP and non-SAP finance data real-time to
a central S/4HANA system, but still
allowing drilldown to the original document
in the SAP systems.
Cash Management
There is a suite of programs, Cash
Operations, Bank Account Management
(BAM) and Liquidity Management that
replace the classic cash and liquidity
management, and you can centrally manage
the actual and forecast cash positions from
SAP and non-SAP systems by using the One
Exposure operations Hub. Transactions such
as FF7A and FF7B (cash management and
liquidity forecast) are now Fiori apps.
House banks and house bank accounts,
which are now master data, can be managed
by users in Fiori, along with banks
hierarchies or groupings, overdraft limits,
signatories and approvals flows and
additional reporting such as the foreign bank
account report, helps compliancy. The
hierarchy uses the bank business partner role
Bank accounts can also be downloaded and
uploaded to and from Excel, for reporting,
migrations and mass changes. They are
created in the productive system, but still
need to be replicated to the development and
quality assurance systems etc. as
statements still needs to be made in the
development system and moved through
quality to production as usual.
If you don’t want to implement the full Bank
Account Management (BAM), then Basic
Cash management is also available,
previously known as BAM Lite. 
Other Fiori apps available include for cash
operations include the Incoming bank
statements monitor, cash payments and
approvals, cash position reports, transfers,
cash pooling. 
Figure 22 Examples of a Few Bank Management
Apps in Fiori
FI12_HBANK is the SAP GUI transaction
for the user that replaces the House Bank
icon in the customizing transaction FBZP,
(see Figure 23), although you will find more
functionality in the Fiori App such as the
hierarchies and groupings. After entering the
company code on the first screen you can
display, amend or create new house banks.
Figure 23FI12_HBANK - House Bank Transaction
in SAP GUI
New Asset
Accounting
Depreciation Areas - You still have the
choice of using the parallel ledgers brought
in by the New GL or accounting for
different accounting principles using a
different range of GL accounts. However,
even if you use different accounts for the
different accounting principles, you still
need to set them up in asset accounting as
dummy ledgers.   You no longer need to set
up delta depreciation areas where you have
additional accounting principles, but you do
need to have a one to one match for each
currency and ledger in Finance with a
depreciation area in Asset Accounting.
The depreciation areas are now equal (i.e.
depreciation area 1 does not have to be the
leading ledger) and transaction ASKB, (post
additional depreciation areas periodically to
finance), has been removed because you can
post all depreciation areas to Finance in real-
time if required.  Because all the postings
are real-time, you can navigate and drill
down to most of the financial documents not
just those in depreciation area 1.  required to post the other depreciation areas
Postings – As with finance, a lot of the
tables are now redundant and a lot of the
asset information comes across via the
Universal Journal in table ACDOCA. The
asset balance sheet accounts are now all
reconciliation accounts – even those in the
additional depreciation areas, which
prevents manual postings that are not
updating the assets. The depreciation run
posting has been improved and the
depreciation journal contains asset
information at line item detail so in the GL
line item report you can see the amounts by
asset, see Figure 16
Figure 16 Depreciation Account in GL Account
Line Item Display
You can also drilldown to the asset
accounting from the finance document (click
on asset accounting icon in Figure 17) to see
the postings by ledger group. 
Figure 17 Finance Document for Asset Acquisition
In Figure 18, you can see the Technical
Clearing account functionality. This is
in real-time, whilst allowing the flexibility
to post each asset differently in each ledger.
Some accounts, for example vendors,
customers, GRIR account and tax accounts
cannot be posted to unilaterally i.e. in one
ledger and not others. Therefore, the
acquisition or retirement posting is split into
at least two documents. The first is called
the operational posting and has a blank
ledger group i.e. it posts equally to all
ledgers. 
The posting for an acquisition is credit
vendor and debit technical clearing account.
The second, valuating posting, then posts
between the technical clearing account and
the asset with a separate document for each
ledger.  To get to the posting for the
additional ledgers and currencies, you have
to click on the A/P Currency icon (which
stands for Accounting Principle/Currency)
and you can see the document in Figure 22
shares the same operational posting with
document 1900000019 but has a different
valuating posting with document
7000000073 instead of 100000048 which
was the document number for the leading
ledger.
Figure 18 Figure 14 Drilldown to Ledger Postings
by Asset
Figure 19 Asset Acquisition, Parallel Ledger
Posting
Accounting Principle and Depreciation Area
are new fields now available in many new
transactions (e.g. ABZOL instead of ABZO,
or ABUML instead of ABUM and so on), so
there is no longer a need for depreciation
area specific transaction types.
Settlement rules can also be ledger specific
if required, see example in Figure 20
Figure 20 Ledger Specific Settlement Rules
Year-End – this is now carried forward as
part of the finance transaction FAGLGVTR,
in other words both the general ledger and
assets are carried forward together 
Statistical postings – instead of statistical
cost elements with cost category 90 there is
now a special field in the GL account master
record only in fixed asset and material
reconciliation accounts called Apply Acct
Assignments Statistically in Fixed Asset
Acct/Material Acct.
Figure 21 Asset Statistical Account Assignment
I have written more about New Asset
Accounting in my latest E-Bite Introducing
New Asset Accounting in SAP S/4HANA –
you can find out more at
https://goo.gl/qIbdQZ which is a short cut to
the SAP Press site. This book covers how
new asset accounting works in S/4HANA
and is aimed at users who are new to SAP as
well as those migrating from earlier versions
of SAP.
Author: Oona Flanagan
Oona Flanagan is an expert Fixer, a qualified
accountant and an S/4 HANA consultant who has
spent over 17 years as an SAP FICO Consultant
for a number of multinational projects, mainly in
Europe. She has covered all aspects of the
implementations, support and training for many
well-known companies such as SAP themselves,
Unilever, Coca Cola, Burberry, Danone, Britvic,
BNP Paribas, Deloitte, Uniphar, Bombardier, Moet
Hennessy. Author of several SAP Press E-Bites on come back down the road. We are also
the GR/IR and the payment program and more offering similar Services.
recently: "Introducing New Asset Accounting in
SAP S/4HANA".

Module(s): Controlling, Financial Accounting,

Investment Management, Materials Management,
Project Systems (PS), Sales and Distribution,
Treasury.

Tagged: S/4 HANA, Finance

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COMMENTS (15)
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Harish 6 months ago · 0 Likes

  

Very Nicely Presented

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hyderabad 4 months ago · 0 Likes
  

I’m not that much of a internet reader to be

honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up!
I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to
Prachi A year ago · 0 Likes
Complete practical implementation are
explained here very properly. s4 hana is
implemented in many of the sap
modules.SAP S4 hana simple finance is one
of the advanced module in financial sectors.
Hope this site will give you more
details:https://www.sapvits.com/project/sap-
simple-finance-online-training/
Mithun 2 years ago · 0 Likes
Very Good Article with lots of useful
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Hyderabad 2 years ago · 0 Likes
  
  
Great Article, thanks for sharing the
Gret blog on Finance Differences in SAP knowledge.
S/4HANA. Thanks for sharing this post.
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Samuel Iheme 2 years ago · 0 Likes

  
Fantastic article, straight to the points.
thanks you for sharing.
Prateek 2 years ago · 0 Likes
  
Thank you so much. A brilliant and concise
document.
Micherl 2 years ago · 0 Likes
Great article, thanks. You mentioned that
FIORI is more user-friendly for invoices,
would you have more details? For example,
would it be faster to create a hundred
invoices with FIORI that using the SAP
GUI, or is it only nicer to the eye?
Jarlei Nascimento 3 years ago · 0 Likes
  

Excellent post, thank you to share.

Shaik mastan vali 3 years ago · 0 Likes

  

It is useful

JOHN Stuart 3 years ago · 0 Likes

  

Hello Flanagan
Article is very useful.. Do you know how
1709 handles if we have two fiscal calendar
where both calender's start and end date is
different.Yes, we could create a ledger
group that has representative ledger follows
lead ledger fiscal year.But this will not help
to calculate the correct
depreciation/retirement posting because
when we do the deprecation , system follows
lead ledger depreciation start date.
Any insights how to handle this situation
systematically rather than an enhancing the
deprecation posting?
sk kamruzzaman 3 years ago · 0 Likes
Hi Oona,
very nice document.
Could you please explain more on Central
Finance which will be very helpful, if
possible.
Advance Thanks,
Sk Kamruzzaman
Vishal Jadhav 3 years ago · 0 Likes
Hello Oona Flanagan,
Really nice document and helpful to
understand in detail manner. Could you
please share S/4 HANA Finance or
Controlling differences on so called HANA
1709 premises ?
Thanks again for sharing such valuable
information.
Regards,
Vishal Jadhav
Email- vishal.jadhav4854@gmail.com
Marcelo 4 years ago · 1 Like
Thank you so much. The document is very
important to explain the new S/4HANA. I´d
like to know more information about New
GL and Cash management if you could.
Best regards
Marcelo Silva
Newer PostUnits of Measure and Their
Behavior Inside Custom ABAP Code
 Older PostAsk a Fixer: What You Should
Know About Profitability Analysis with S/4
HANA Finance

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