Over a decade ago, SAP took the first steps toward the cloud with the introduction of their first true Cloud ERP: SAP Business ByDesign. This solution has since evolved into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which clearly demonstrates SAP's ongoing commitment to helping financial professionals keep up in the constantly changing world. Find out what SAP S/4HANA Cloud entails and what it can do for your organization in this blog.
Basically, any finance work you do in the cloud is a form of cloud finance. You can "lift and shift" a highly customized ERP environment into a hyperscaler like Amazon or Microsoft and call that "Cloud," but a pure Public Cloud version is a much more attractive alternative. Why?
With a pure Public Cloud solution like SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, you have software that stays up-to-date and where new features and changes can be integrated quickly. In this way, you are not dependent on expensive development and maintenance costs for modifications and it is not necessary to have extensive technical knowledge in-house.
Cloud Finance is an umbrella term that includes the following products from SAP:
- S/4HANA Public Cloud for finance operations including Advanced Financial Close and Receivables & Cash Management, Group Reporting for consolidation
- SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for Planning and Forecasting
- SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) for integration, extension and authorization
What are the benefits of Cloud Finance with SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud?
- Simplicity: 1 contract with 1 vendor for your ERP and related solutions.
- Always up to date: with the Clean Core (mandatory), SAP can always update the tenant to ensure that conforms to the latest legislation and security patches.
- Security: responsibility for application security now lies with SAP, a leading player that invests billions a year in this area.
- Open and "composable": this feature has been more or less enforced by the market so that an SAP application with the API Hub now fits well into a diverse landscape with other vendors.
- Real time: the integration of the various finance components in S/4HANA Public Cloud such as Group Reporting communicate in real time with other application such as SAP Analytics Cloud for real-time dashboards and reports.
"Finext does not focus specifically on selling SAP modules, but solves problems in the CFO's office."
Finext does not focus specifically on selling SAP modules; we solve problems in the CFO's office. SAP is modular and we focus on providing a toolbox that clients can use to address a wide range of problems. There are other benefits as well. For example, SAP S/4HANA is distinguished by its integrated approach. This gives you seamless integration within S/4HANA Public Cloud with Group Reporting, SAP Analytics Cloud and other BTP products. There is no more financial silo, everyone works together within one platform. How does this vision of collaboration and problem solving within this toolbox translate into practice?
- Power users can customize screens themselves and add objects to an input screen that are later nicely ready to be used in reports.
- S/4HANA Public Cloud itself has an Embedded ABAP environment (Steampunk) where extensions can be built in the SAP specific ABAP programming language.
- If you don't have ABAP legacy, it often makes more sense to add functionality with low-code/no-code solutions such as Mendix, Outsystems, Microsoft PowerApps or SAP Build Tools. the SAP API ensures that the application Depending on the knowledge you already have or can get better at, you can program against the SAP APIs and extend functionality that way.
SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud can be purchased in four combinable packages: Baseline, Finance-led, Service Centric and Product Centric. The Finance-led package is the most interesting if you want to be the first to bring these processes to the cloud. Baseline is the solution for a really fast implementation: think one to two months. This can be useful for start-ups and scale-ups that need to quickly provide solid insight into funding with tooling that can be trusted with it.
Our knowledge of finance processes has led us to use the SAP puzzle pieces to provide customers with solutions. This allows us to offer the "Public Edition Premium", consisting of Group Reporting, Advanced Financial Close and Receivables & Cash management, and complete it with Financial Planning and Analysis on SAP Analytics Cloud. With this we strengthen the complete office of the CFO, including a solid configuration , with which everything is perfectly aligned from Record 2 Report.
"Our knowledge of finance processes has led us to use the SAP puzzle pieces to provide customers with solutions."
