SAP BLOG Technology meets Finance Expertise – SAP S/4HANA 1809

Historically… and still today…core to finance’s organizations key responsibility is to execute the required operational tasks in time and make sure the business keeps on running. While these daily tasks are still mission critical the way in which this work is done – continues to evolve exponentially – as new innovations in technology have unlocked past limitations empowering finance to produce higher levels of efficiency, excellence and value across the enterprise.

Additionally, the role of ‘finance’ got augmented – supplementary the business leaders and partners expect finance to deliver the necessary insights for a fact-based decision making to optimize or renew their business models.

With the increasing pace the digital economy is changing, these expectations will continue to grow.

Once again SAP is ahead of the curve – pioneers in excellence and delivers state of the art finance systems by leveraging the latest innovations to bring unapparelled value to the finance organization. Leading customers into a new era of intelligent enterprise – where finance professionals can concentrate on higher value tasks.

Announcing the next level of Intelligent Finance with the SAP S/4HANA 1809




To free up time to concentrate on these higher value tasks, operational tasks clearly cannot just be abandoned. They need to be executed, but in a dramatically more efficient way: The introducing of an unprecedented level of automation.

Increasing efficiency in operational finance with new Machine Learning scenarios

With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release SAP has added multiple new machine learning scenarios on top of the existing cases. This lifts the level of automation to the next level:

• The goods and invoice receipt reconciliation process, not only all relevant information is brought together in just one screen, but machine learning brings pro-active recommendations to resolve specific issues. On top, by integrating our digital assistant into the process, users experience a much more fluent collaboration. All aimed at quicker and more efficient reconciled items.
• As part of the evolution towards a continuous close, the introduction of machine learning supports us in making the accrual management process not only more efficient but more accurate as well

Extending the reach of decision support by optimizing analytics and including forward-looking insights

An interesting fact is, that modern organizations on their journey of automation and a higher focus on delivering insights, still only looking back at the past. In other terms: there is a high focus on reporting on actuals. Comparing with plans at best.

That’s interesting of course but tells us little about the future. Most organizations are convinced about the fact that more effort should be spent on forward-looking insights.

To make this happen, classic reporting activities need to be performed more efficiently.

With SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, further enhancements are added to enable a more complete real-time margin analysis, including predictions through:

• We further improved our real-time margin analysiswith integrating profitability information in the universal journal
• The introduction of predictive accounting, which unlike mathematics-based predictions make use of the already available document flow to predict financial results of the future

To cope with a changing organizational view, responding to the need for better insights not only for entity but also at business unit or group level in a more automated way, new key components are being introduced:

• Group reporting – The need to deliver accurate, up-to-date financial information continuouslyin a company’s consolidation process is not limited to the level of an individual entity. Therefore, SAP has introduced the SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting solution which provides direct access to the underlying transactions and detail across the entire enterprise so that a company can confidently and efficiently consolidate their financial and managerial results required in their closing cycles. It enables organizations to extend this evolution towards a continuous financial close on group level. It provides unprecedented transparency by delivering a complete flow of collection, processing, analysis and publication of the information.
• Embedded analytics – Most finance professionals will agree that it is often cumbersome to get interesting information out of their ERP system. Additional capabilities have been added to support business users in getting insights more flexibly and efficiently, so they can concentrate on acting on the information, rather than investing time in number crunching.
• Tax service – Global tax regulations get more diverse, complicated and change more often than ever before. Keeping up with the pace of change, typically in multiple systems, is a challenge. SAP’s response is a central tax determination engine with rules and rates maintained by SAP or its partners. With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, emphasis has been placed on enabling self-service tax management, facilitating an organization’s chosen approach to reduce the risks and costs of inaccurate calculations and liability from non-compliance.

More improvements in both the transactional as well as the analytics area

As you can see, many important new and enhanced capabilities are made available with the S/4HANA 1809 release supporting the finance function better than ever before.

To make it easy to learn more about the new benefits we prepared a series of videos:

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Finance Overview

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Margin Analysis

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Predictive Accounting

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Embedded Analytics

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Accruals Management

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Goods and Invoice Receipt Reconciliation

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Group Reporting

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Tax Service

SAP S/4HANA 1809 – Treasury Management



If you want to learn more about SAP S/4HANA for finance professionals visit Financial Management & Accounting Systems for Business | SAP

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