At SAP Sapphire 2025, one thing was clear: finance teams are leading the next wave of enterprise transformation.
✔️ From AI-powered automation in SAP S/4HANA to deeper planning integration in SAP Analytics Cloud
✔️ From real-time ESG reporting with the Green Ledger to strategic insights from global CFOs
The message was consistent — finance is evolving from record-keeping to value creation.
This recap covers the most important updates for finance professionals, including embedded AI, connected planning, and the technologies reshaping the CFO’s role.
SAP Analytics Cloud is leveling up in Q2 2025 — and finance teams are set to benefit the most. From tighter integration with SAP PaPM in Multi Actions to live connectivity with Google BigQuery, this release focuses on automation, insight, and speed.
This blog covers the top updates finance professionals need to know — including Smart Insights in optimized stories, Joule-powered natural language queries, and new ways to pin insights in Data Analyzer — all designed to supercharge planning, analysis, and decision-making.
In SAP S/4HANA Finance, the Universal Journal (ACDOCA) forms the core of financial and controlling data. This blog breaks down the key things every consultant needs to know — from Margin Analysis and document splitting to embedded analytics and custom field extensions.
Whether you're implementing, migrating, or optimizing, this guide covers the essentials of ACDOCA and how to use it effectively in 2025.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03 introduces powerful AI-driven capabilities that streamline core finance and operations processes. With innovations like Joule AI agents and Insight Apps—built on SAP Business Data Cloud—organizations can automate journal entries, predict labor demand, optimize sales fulfillment, and generate intelligent financial reports with minimal manual effort.
This blog explores the key AI features embedded in the FPS03 release and how they help finance teams shift from transactional processing to strategic analysis. By adopting these tools, businesses can reduce costs, enhance accuracy, and lay the foundation for a more agile, data-driven future in financial management.
Earlier this year, SAP announced the availability of Joule for ABAP developers, bringing AI-powered assistance directly into ADT. This transforms SAP FI customization with smart code completion, real-time error detection, and automated compliance checks—streamlining ABAP development for S/4HANA.
In this blog we will see how AI is changing SAP development.
SAP Central Business Configuration (SAP CBC) is a new tool that is used to configure a business process spanning different SAP cloud solutions from one central place. SAP CBC allows you to manage your configurations for SAP cloud implementations and ongoing operations centrally through Project Experience. We can initiate change anytime to make additions to your scope and organizational structure or make changes to existing configuration settings.
In a recent survey conducted by APOS, a prominent SAP partner, 80% of BusinessObjects (BOBJ) customers participating in a BOBJ regroup webinar indicated that they were in the process of migrating from their current BOBJ version or at least had migration plans within the next few months.
From trending YouTube videos discussing the future of SAP BOBJ developers to SAP's latest Business Intelligence (BI) statement of direction released in April, it's only natural to have concerns about the current state of SAP BOBJ.
The new General Ledger on SAP S/4HANA or ECC has certain advantages over Class GL. Examples: usage of parallel ledgers, Document splitting, Profit Center Financial statements, Segment' reporting that is required for segment reporting according to IAS and U.S. GAAP, etc. In addition, Customers can enhance the new General Ledger flexibly, that is, they can enter user-defined fields and update the relevant totals. Many standard reports can evaluate the information from the user-defined fields. Customers can use the 'Document Splitting' functionality to create financial statements at the company code level and, if required, for entities, such as the segment. As a result, we no longer have to carry out time-consuming reconciliation tasks between FI and CO for the end of the period since cross-entity processes are transferred in real-time to the new General Ledger in Controlling.
Starting from 1709, In new installations of SAP S/4HANA, the new General Ledger Accounting is activated by default. The existing ECC customers moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA will also get new GL automatically. As a result, ECC customers will also move to New GL on SAP S/4HANA Conversion. However, they cannot implement document splitting or a further accounting principle/ledger during the conversion project. The architecture of the accounting module in SAP S/4HANA from the 1709 version is based on the concept of the former "New GL". The concept of the Subsequent Implementation of Document Splitting in SAP S/4HANA differs from the Migration Scenario 6 of the "New GL".
If you are new to SAP, you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available online. How do you know which sites are reliable, up-to-date, and relevant to your needs? As an SAP Consultant myself, this is one issue, I myself have been plagued with. After years of skimming the web, I decided to compile a list of helpful sites I would recommend as go-to for SAP resources. Whether you are searching for tutorials, blogs, forums, podcasts, or courses, these sites will help you learn SAP faster and easier.
This article will discuss an overview of analytics in the modern SAP digital economy, SAP's embedded analytics Strategy, the VDM model, and examples and use cases of Embedded Fiori Applications.
The Modern SAP Digital Economy
SAP’s Embedded Analytics Strategy
The VDM model
Use Cases For Embedded Fiori Applications
Customers moving to SAP S/4HANA come from different backgrounds and have different end goals. RISE with SAP is designed to address unique customer scenarios. RISE is not a system upgrade, it's a redesigned method of working that allows customers to change not only once, but to continuously transform. Rise with SAP simplifies a customer's move to the cloud and helps throughout their business transformation journey. RISE with SAP delivers seamlessly with SAP partners, Hyperscaler partners, the Reseller community, and Software partners. RISE with SAP is designed to help SAP customers.
To become a trusted expert and earn the "SAP Consultant" title, you must, in some way, have some validation to back your knowledge, skills, and expertise. One way to earn this validation is by getting SAP-certified!
In our last article, we defined SAP Consulting as the activities, processes, and tasks SAP consultants undertake to help SAP customers manage and optimize their business operations. While SAP consulting comes in various forms and flavors, a successful SAP consultant typically excels in certain aspects and qualities, irrespective of his or her domain. In this article, we will cover ten basic skills every SAP consultant needs to be successful and why.
SAP, commonly pronounced as 'sæp' or S-A-P (System, Application, and Products In Data Processing), is a software company that offers transformative enterprise management solutions to businesses around the globe.
The SAP company is a leader in ERP technology and business solutions.
SAP ranks amongst the Fortune 500 as the third-largest publicly-traded company(by revenue) globally.
One reason for these statistics is their top-tier customer base. SAP solutions are frequently expensive, closed source, and require professionals to implement.
Here at ERP Fixers, we know too well how challenging implementing SAP software can be, hence the need for trained SAP experts, typically known as SAP consultants in the SAP Ecosystem.
This article will discuss SAP Consulting, the types of SAP Consulting, how to become an SAP consultant, and finally, the prospects of SAP consulting.
We can define SAP Consulting as the activities, processes, and tasks. SAP consultants undertake to help SAP customers manage and optimize their business operations.
There are numerous SAP consultant types; as a matter of fact, there are as many SAP Consultants as SAP Products.
However, we can group sap consultants into two main categories, functional consultants and technical consultants.
This category of SAP consultants works closely with the domain experts and developers to set up and enable the use of functional SAP modules deployed within user departments.
Liaising with Heads of Departments during business process design and implementation phases.
Liaising extensively with heads of departments and "super users" to understand their SAP requirements and provide solutions to business needs. Enforcement of internal controls within SAP and other business systems.
Provide user manuals and training to users of enterprise systems.
Provide operational and periodic ad-hoc reports to administration to aid decision-making on SAP and SAP-related Systems.
Examples of functional SAP consultant roles are SAP MM Consultant, SAP PaPm Consultant, SAP HCM consultant, etc.
These categories of SAP consultants are more tech-savvy and work closely with the functional consultants to implement, modify or enhance the existing SAP system.
Based on approval, work together with functional consultants to proactively implement new features, introduce new systems and modify existing business processes to improve efficiency.
Oversee and manage projects to modify, enhance, or implement new functionality on SAP and other related products.
Support users on change control and management.
Examples of technical SAP consultant roles are SAP ABAP Developer, SAP BW Consultant, SAP Basis consultant, etc.
We have found two significant routes to commence your career as an SAP Consultant.
The SAP Young Professional Program is an initiative by SAP Digital Skills Center created to bridge the digital gap existing in today's workforce.
The program is designed to:
Sieve top graduates and subsequently equip them with soft skills, accredited SAP certifications, and a sense of belonging within the SAP Community.
Set a stage for career growth within the SAP Ecosystem as potential SAP consultants.
Balance the demand for SAP consultants across the SAP Ecosystem.
If you are interested in an SAP career and a B.s.c in Business Administration, Management Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, you should consider applying.
Suppose you already have some experience working with SAP, maybe as a superuser in your company. In that case, you might want to consider this path.
Pick your preferred SAP module.
Invest in the training course for that module
Write certification exam
Intern or Volunteer to join up with an SAP Consulting firm to gain experience.
With this route, your credibility and experience will be evident to potential employers. You stand a higher chance of being considered for SAP Consultant roles.
SAP is an in-demand profession, and there are many possibilities within the sap consulting space.
In this section, I will outline a few prospects for sap consulting.
SAP software is to the ERP ecosystem what Apple products are to the tech-gadget industry. SAP software is relatively expensive and usually deployed by enterprises with high budgets and large-scale businesses. Hence, the reason for top-notch earnings in the industry. The compensation for SAP consultants ranks among the highest, with opportunities for job growth prospects, salary, quality of life, and other benefits. PayScale estimates an average SAP Consultant salary at $89,129k per year.
According to most recent articles and employment agencies, jobs in SAP consulting are high in demand. Due to the increased demand for technology solutions, they will continually rise.
According to Glassdoor, SAP ranks as the "best places to work in 2022". Due to its success as an international brand, SAP consultants are highly regarded and respected in the corporate world.
Companies might experience challenges in Planning as the economy has been transitioning towards Digitalization. Enterprises face new challenges with the latest changes and developments. Top and middle-level management across organizations have questions about leveraging the ever-growing data available to enable quick and fast decision-making. Accounting and Finance officers have planning, budgeting & forecasting at the top of their priority list of initiatives for improving performance. Well-integrated financial planning is necessary for their initiatives. Companies with these capabilities grow faster and can better serve their customers to seize new opportunities than their competitors.
The GR/IR clearing account is used for clearing GRs and invoices. In case of quantity differences between GRs and IRs, some items remain open in the GR/IR clearing account. If further deliveries, return deliveries, invoices, or credit memos do not clear a quantity difference for a purchase order item, you must maintain the GR/IR clearing account for that item. In this article, I would like to provide an overview on GR/IR account maintenance & How to perform GR/IR clearing account maintenance.
Within newer versions of Open SQL, you can now add both simple and complex conditions using the CASE.. ENDCASE expression. In addition, you may use the SUBSTRING function in order to extract part of a character field. In this article, we will see the two topics, along with coding examples and output illustrations.
By now, everyone has heard about some of the major changes that occur in S/4HANA Finance, such as the Universal Journal, New Asset Accounting, mandatory Material Ledger, and so on. A huge difference between S/4HANA Finance and ECC, is the merging of the Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) modules (the proverbial “Single Source of Truth”), and most of the Controlling functionalities are now subsumed into the Universal Journal.
Some public sector companies must control the annual budget to certify that its expenses are below the budget provided for each cost center and cost element. The primary objective of the SAP Funds Management (FM) module is to address this.
When this module is activated, it interacts with several other SAP modules, especially MM, which controls all acquisitions made by the company. This interaction begins from Purchase Requisition to Invoice Verification.
SAP Controlling practitioners who have used activity types for absorption costing, have often asked about the integration of SAP Production Planning and SAP Controlling and how this setup works behind-the-scenes. This blog post is an attempt to explain the mechanics of activity types, their configuration, master data and transactional data setup. I hope this write-up is useful to SAP Controlling practitioners.
SAP provides mainstream maintenance for core applications of SAP Business Suite 7 software including SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Customer Relationship Management 7.0, SAP Supply Chain Management 7.0, and SAP Supplier Relationship Management 7.0 applications and SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA on the respective latest three Enhancement Packages (EhPs) until December 31, 2027. From January 1, 2028, all SAP Business Suite 7 core applications and respective SAP Business Suite 7 add-on products will enter the customer-specific maintenance (CSM) phase. SAP offers an optional extended maintenance phase from January 1, 2028, until December 31, 2030. This three-year phase comes at an additional fee on top of the maintenance fee. Details outlined in SAP Note 2881788.
Data archiving is not a new concept as organizations use it to manage the database volume to manage SAP footprints. As S/4HANA architecture, where the database is already a columnar database for a robust and fast performance of reporting/transactions, why are we discussing data archiving now? There can still be organizations with a very high data footprint and looking for archiving old data, especially for clients who converted their old SAP system to S/4HANA and thus may carry the legacy data if not archived before moving to S/4HANA.
The Embedded Analytical tools may be divided based on usage. CDS Views are the foundation for all analytical applications. Programmers create a virtual data model using CDS views. In comparison, the key user uses CDS views to create dashboards. "Custom Analytical Queries" will be used to develop customer queries. Finance and Logistics end users. Use reports and dashboards created by the key user. Functional users will use SAP Smart Business Cockpits with predefined content for different multidimensional reports across all business lines.
Some multidimensional reports provide to end-users through SAP Fiori. They have flexible slice-and-dice navigation features. "Query Browser" will help end-users for analytic queries that allow them with flexible slice and dice reporting. "View Browser" is another tool to check the delivered CDS Views and Queries. These tools help the Functional team ( Finance, Logistics, ………… users) to get reports with no latency, no data duplication, excellent performance for all types of reports, Integration scenarios with SAP BW, and also Support for SAP ERP authorizations.
1. Report Design Modeler — Apps
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The Report Design Modeler apps are a set of SAP Fiori apps that customers can use to create and manage Financial or Logistics or any other reports. When created an evaluation, we choose a tile to visualize the reports in the Publish Report app.
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You define this using the Configure Report Drill-Down app.
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Business knowledge helps to configure the drill-down views. Configure Report Drill-Down app is used by power users who can see data in Graphs IT administrative knowledge is needed to authorize users to get access to these reports
You may use this capability for all most all Finance reports like:
Analyze Actual Cash Flow, Liquidity Forecast, Budget Alerts, Contract Expiry, Aging Analysis,
Analyze Change Impact, Analyze Collections Success, Analyze Collections Volume, Analyze Credit Exposure, Analyze Open Credits, Analyze Overdue Items / Overdue Item Analysis, Analyze Payment Locks, Analyze Payment Run Exceptions, Cash Discount Utilization, Cash Discount Forecast, Cash Collection Tracker - Accounts Receivable, Cash Position, Analyze Returns, Operational Supplier Evaluation / Supplier Evaluation, Payment Statistics, Credit Limit Utilization, Days Payable Outstanding Analysis,
Days Sales Outstanding, Detect MRP Situations, Future Receivables, Future Payables……….Etc.
2. Overview of View Browser and Query Browser
The View Browser
View browser allows Power users from all business lines to explore thousands of VDM views without any technical skills. So, it helps Business Users to draw meaningful reports for their business requirements. You can find suitable views based on your need and display its content for analytical queries in Design Studio. Using View Browser, we can explore standard Core Data Service views (Composite and Consumption) and create developers.
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The Query Browser
The Query Browser is a default Design Studio app that is available in the standard SAP Fiori Library.
The Query Browser is not part of the SAP Fiori launchpad's default view and is added to the My Home group. The Query Browser will show consumption views that were annotated as Analytical Query and therefore act as a source for KPIs. Users can select an Analytical Query and perform on-demand reporting on it.
The Query Browser is a default Design Studio app available in the standard SAP Fiori Library. No additional installation is required.
In the Query Browser, you can see many analytical queries.
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Business catalog SAP_CA_BC_VDM is to assigned to the user.
3. Custom Analytical Queries app
For creating Financial or Logistics or a report that is needed from any business line, from scratch, SAP provides the built-in, easy-to-use, Custom Analytical Queries app. It is aimed at key users, rather than end-users. An advantage of it is that you don't have to understand the query language to build a query.
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Required Business Role: SAP_BR_ANALYTICS_SPECIALIST
Required Technical Catalog: SAP_BASIS_TCR_T
Activated ICF node: ANA_QDESIGN_MAN (ICF path /sap/bc/ui5_ui5/sap/ana_qdesign_man)
Example: Power-user wants a report from Cost Center Module.
Customers can create a Custom Analytical Query to report in Cost Center Module on Actual Vs. Plan data. We can also have a drill-down facility
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4. The Report Designer Modeling apps
The Report Designer Modeling apps are a set of SAP Fiori apps that a key user uses to define or manage reports.
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These Reports are based on the Analytical List Page Smart Template.
Customers can Create Reports using create report app based on measures of the related Analytical Query.
Just enter the relevant data source details such as the Core Data Services (CDS) view, the OData service path, and the entity set that corresponds to the CDS view.
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Choose Activate and Add Evaluation.
5. The KPI designer - Smart Business Framework
SAP Fiori Smart Business helps customers create their analytical apps based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
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Smart Business Cockpits can be personalized. They bring analytics into the business process when the user needs it. Customers can develop an Analytical Query to analyze business data using the KPI Designer tool.
You can create a KPI, in the following order:
· Create KPI
· Create Evaluation
· Create Tile
· Configure Drill-Down
· Manage KPI Associations (optional)
6. SAP Analytics UIs
SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office is a Microsoft Office Add-In that allows multidimensional Analysis When you install Analysis for Microsoft Office on your local machine; you can connect directly to the following:
SAP Business Warehouse (BW) system
SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP HANA
Using Analysis for Office, you can also access Core Data Services view based queries and view the report.
7. SAP delivers several standard reports.
You can find these reports at various locations under the Information System in the SAP Easy Access menu.
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Almost every application in the system has an Information System menu option, which contains the reports predefined by SAP. You can also display thru SE43.
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You can search standard reports in SE38, by the letters they contain. For example,
Vendor related reports can are found by RFK*
Customer-related Reports can be searched by letter RFD*
General ledger RFS*
Document Reports: RFB*
SAP Central Finance (CFIN), every large organization is thinking/talking about it is one or another way! It quickly gives the S/4HANA value benefits without necessarily disrupting existing processes. In such CFIN projects, there is a mandatory step for the initial load, even if you do not want to migrate the historical data from the legacy system to the SAP Central Finance system.
