Janet Salmon - Controlling with SAP S/4HANA: The Official Business User Guide

Digital transformation impacts all industries. Success depends on getting people, processes, technology, and data right. Worldwide crises such as the current pandemic amplify the pressure on that transition. To be successful, companies have to be flexible, extensible, and adaptable. An intelligent, flexible, and comprehensive finance solution is the key enabler for digital transformation. Customers want to get rid of painful, manual steps. They expect the support of new business models and intelligent and fully integrated business processes across the whole enterprise. Automation supported by intelligent technologies is key. Its all about rethinking business processes.

For our customers, SAP S/4HANA is the gateway to this digital transformation.

SAP HANA provides the new foundation for our finance applications. Based on the potential and power of the SAP HANA database, we drive application innovations toward an intelligent enterprise. In the past, finance was mainly transaction-based and acted as the integration hub for logistical processes. It was about collecting figures and crunching numbers. Finance in SAP S/4HANA is no longer just about integration: it is about intelligent finance.

The Universal Journal provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art base layer for our finance applications. It is the single source of truth that ensures data integrity by design and makes reconciliation obsolete. Dispensing with aggregates and building analytics upon individual journal entry items, it allows 360-degree reporting and unprecedented insights. And more than that, the Universal Journal is the enabler for business innovations such as margin analysis, event-based revenue recognition, and predictive accounting.

As head of the SAP S/4HANA Finance and Risk development team, I am particularly pleased that, with this book, we get the opportunity to present the innovations, advantages, and business value within management accounting as a cornerstone of SAP S/4HANA Finance. In this book, we present the building blocks of management accounting and provide a deeper insight into organizational structures and master data.

The book aims to provide a comprehensive picture of management accounting within SAP S/4HANA Finance, giving detailed insights into overhead controlling, production controlling, customer project controlling, margin analysis for products and services, investment controlling, and intercompany processes. The authors, Janet Salmon and Stefan Walz, describe and explain the basic ideas and help you to understand how SAP S/4HANA management accounting improves your day-to-day processes and adds value to your overall business across the enterprise.

I am really pleased that Janet and Stefan joined forces for this book. Both have many years of experience in management accounting and understand integration within the intelligent enterprise in depth. They are connected and in a continuous exchange with a huge number of customers and partners. Janet and Stefan are role models in looking at the processes from end to end to drive innovations within SAP S/4HANA Finance and Risk.