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SAP Simple Finance is a comprehensive portfolio of Finance solutions  and revolutionizes how CFOs manage their businesses – by closing books radically fast, by performing consolidation in real-time, or by managing cash and receivables in ways never possible before – all thanks to SAP HANA.

It delivers instant insight, is easy to use and easy to consume. It enhances the current solution portfolio, preserving its functional strength while enabling non-disruptive migration.

Watch the video Solving Problems for CFOs: Thack Brown on SAP Simple Finance.

SAP Simple Finance delivers instant insight

SAP‘s Next Generation Accounting Solution


One of the most important SAP HANA-based innovations in the Simple Finance portfolio is the introduction of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA.

A major investment has focused the on the period end close. The transition to a continuous (soft) close helps the Finance organization to better balance their workload throughout the entire period avoiding today’s stressful and error prone month end crunch.

Accelerating the month end close substantially provides:

  • More timely information for managerial reporting
  • The ability to forecast the period end close more often and with higher accuray
  • The ability to simulate accounting decisions on the fly


Another important example of real-time acceleration within the period end close is intercompany reconciliation.
Intercompany reconciliation is often one of the most labor intensive and time consuming activities at period end. SAP has released new enhancements for SAP ERP that turn intercompany reconciliation from a batch process at period end into a continuous process that can be executed on the fly intra-period.
For this purpose SAP has not only accelerated the processing of information and eliminated several batch jobs, it is also providing new user interfaces.
The new intercompany reconciliation capabilities require SAP HANA and can be run side-by-side to a current SAP ERP installation.

With a Central Journal our customers be benefit from the flexibility and speed of reporting of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA (GL, P&L, CO-PA) and report P&L on any dimension (e.g. down to product level).

The headquarter can establish a single source of truth for getting more financial insight in what’s happening in the company with a higher data quality due to built-in ERP validations.  The masterdata can be harmonized “on the fly” in the central system without having to do a large harmonization project throughout the entire system landscape (e.g. common central chart of accounts, single central controlling area, single central operating concern). The consolidation preparation can bie done in the central system and adjustment postings and allocations can be performed centrally.

With SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA customers can benefit from:

  • Harmonized internal and external reporting
  • Higher flexibility in reporting and analysis
  • Significantly reduced reconciliation effort
  • Central journal for heterogeneous system landscapes
  • Reporting of the Financial Statement, Balances, Line Items
  • Take advantage of new reporting capabilities of Simple Finance (Analysis for Office,  Design Studio)
  • Simple and easy to use experience
  • Work seamlessly across devices – desktop or tablet
  • Collaboration functionality

SAP Runs SAP: Transforming Financial  Management with SAP HANA

We at SAP deployed this innovation in less than two months, including an evolution from the classical to the new SAP General Ledger application. Users can now better understand business drivers by analyzing all financial data in real time, on any dimension and without cumbersome reconciliation processes.

“The financials add-on for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA was deployed in less than two months without any disruption to our business. We now have one common platform for both regulatory and managerial accounting as well as on-the-fly financial processes. This innovation will help us deliver stronger financial leadership through better advice on strategic and operational plans that impact the business performance and effectiveness of SAP.”

Luka Mucic, Chief Financial Officer, SAP AG

SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA - Moving controlling and finance closer together


Let's give you some background from a technical point of view. SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA replaces the current accounting capabilities in SAP ERP Financials with the main characteristics of:

  • Convergence of FI and CO. One logical document is the common basis for both regulatory and managerial accounting. Thereby a much higher degree of consistency between FI and CO has been created abolishing the need for time consuming and error prone manual reconciliation.
  • Abolishment of pre-defined aggregates, now fully line-item based. All aggregation and transaction processing is now performed on the fly based on HANA Live views, thereby abolishing the aggregates and indices in FI and CO. This fact is a further move to preserve data consistency throughout the entire technology stack.
  • More flexible reporting. As a beneficial side effect, reports can now be configured by the end user in a more flexible way without requiring any assistance from IT. In addition, more flexible drill down to line item level is provided and all data fields of the accounting records are available in reporting.

Janet Salmon, Chief Product Owner for Management Accounting at SAP AG, explains in the plenary session from Controlling 2014 conference, how SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA, part of SAP Simple Finance, is moving controlling and finance closer together:

  • Changes to report revenue and cost of goods sold by the CO-PA dimensions and how break out the cost of goods sold into multiple accounts
  • How overhead is captured and allocated either from cost centers to CO-PA dimensions (assessment) or from high-level to lower-level CO-PA dimensions (top-down distribution)
  • The underlying architecture and how FI and CO line items are linked.
  • New reports that visualize the transformation of expense into cost of goods sold, work in process, and assets under construction
  • How the period close process has been accelerated in SAP Controlling

Learn more.

SAP Simple Finance is easy to use

In addition to driving agility in finance, SAP Simple Finance is also designed to provide the most simple and unified end-to-end experience for easy adoption — from the discovery of the solution to the deployment, until the actual usage by finance users. By leveraging modern design principles, customers also have the option to deploy the SAP Fiori user experience for personalized, responsive and simple interactions across most common financial tasks.

For user-defined reporting, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence provides a full suite for solutions providing reporting and analysis flexibility.

Most solutions can run directly against the HANA Live views. Alternatively, the solutions can access data via BW queries which are then fed from HANA Live.

An important tool in this context is SAP Analysis for Office, SAP’s Excel client for reporting purposes, which is part of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite. End users can define their own personalized reporting view in a side panel within Microsoft Excel.

SAP Simple Finance is easy to consume

We support our customers to flexibly choose their own non-disruptive evolutionary path towards real time.

SAP Simple Finance is based on SAP HANA deployed in the cloud or on premise.

  • SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA is deliverd as part of the financials add-on for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. SAP Simple Finance installation at customer site is quite easy.
  • We offer managed Infrastructure as a Service, known as HANA Enterprise Cloud (commonly known as “HEC”). This is a data center network we’ve developed in partnership with some pretty brilliant companies like IBM, HP etc., that simplifies the operations of our customers by allowing to move their existing SAP applications to these managed data center(s).