Welcome back to the 2105 delivery of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Finance. This time we have a couple of great innovations in store that support the CFO’s finance function to increase automation and accuracy in order to free up time to act as strategic advisor for the business providing data driven insights and unique perspectives across all areas of the enterprise. Specifically, we are proud to bring parallel accounting to the next level with universal parallel accounting and continuously broaden the business scope of revenue and cost accounting to support new business models.

Video 1: 2105 Release Highlights for Finance

Universal Parallel Accounting: Parallel Valuations

Universal parallel accounting allows you to prepare and present financial statements for different sets of accounting standards across end-to-end processes using ledgers. For each ledger, you can perform valuations and reporting based on one accounting standard and thus benefit from consistent value flows and full audit trails that fulfill local and group-wide reporting requirements.

Capabilities

• Define material prices by ledger
• Capitalization of self-manufactured assets by ledger
• Actual cost rate, overheads, settlement and universal allocation are calculated and posted by ledger
• Parallel valuation postings and analysis in production accounting for event-based production orders
• Perform valuation runs and other closing tasks by ledger, resulting in individually calculated values for financial and management accounting
• Display accurate data based on the selected ledger in many Finance apps

Video 2: End2End Value Flow in Universal Parallel Accounting

Value Proposition

• Full audit trails through consistent, parallel information across all ledgers
• High degree of automation and accuracy for parallel legal valuations
• Benefit from the flexibility of the parallel ledgers not only in general ledger accounting but also in various subledgers
• Simplified configuration settings and less manual effort
• Basis for future innovations in the area of parallel valuations

For more detailed information on universal parallel accounting and how to get there you can follow this blog series:

1. Asset accounting for universal parallel accounting
2. Overhead accounting for universal parallel accounting
3. Inventory prices, product cost planning, actual costing for universal parallel accounting
4. Production accounting for universal parallel accounting

And you can read this overview presentation.

Revenue and Cost Accounting

With S/4HANA Cloud 2105 you can support additional bill-of-material scenarios in sell from stock, automate revenue recognition for ad-hoc billing plans in service management, and perform contract-based revenue recognition for subscriptions in the context of Contract Accounting and Invoicing.

Capabilities

Support bill-of-material scenarios with pricing on the header and fulfillment on the item level

Video 3: Event-based revenue recognition – Support of Bill of Materials

Perform revenue recognition for service contracts with ad-hoc billing plans defining milestones with custom date and price information

Video 4: Event-based revenue recognition – Integration with Ad-Hoc Billing for Service Contracts

Provide additional revenue-recognition functionality for Contract Accounting and Invoicing by integrating contract-based revenue recognition with the SAP Subscription Billing solution.

Video 5: Event-based revenue recognition for Subscription Billing and Contract Accounting and Invoicing

Value Proposition

• Increase sales-force process flexibility using an additional bill-of-material consolidating cost and revenue on the BOM main item
• Grow service revenue by building long-term relationships with customers for additional recurring services
• Promote compliance with IFRS 15 and other accounting standards

Further Highlights not described in the video:

SAP Contract and Lease Management

The terms and conditions of a leasing contract vary from simple to very complex.  It takes a power tool to support the accurate abstraction of these lease agreements as well as support compliance with the terms and conditions of the agreement.  The new lease administration Fiori app provides a modern tool to standardize the data capture of a lease agreement, generate reminders for critical dates, calculate the valuations required to support IFRS16 and display all cash flows that will be produced by the agreement.  Powerful search functionality help the organization quickly find agreements based on a large number of criteria.

Capabilities:​

• The app can be used to create, display and change real estate contracts with consumer grade user experience. It is designed to support lease administrators as well as users deeply involved in the lease administration process.
• Improved search capabilities to find leases based on a wide variety of criteria such as business partner, person responsible, start date and contract status
• Ability to create custom views and layouts within each contract section
• Supports the display of customer defined fields

Figure 1: New Contract Management App

Value Proposition:​

• Reduce navigation time to find leases based on key criteria
• Increase usability with a modern user experience
• Greater flexibility in displaying the terms and conditions of the lease agreement

Find further highlights in the area of GRC in Katrin Deissners blog on GRC in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105.

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
• Early Release Webinar Series here
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here
• Implementation Portal here
• Restriction Note for Parallel Accounting in 2105 Release here