Simple Finance on HANA

The first application to be fully re-written to take full advantage of SAP HANA is Simple Finance focusing on Accounting, Cash Management and Integrated Business Planning.  This will allow organizations to have real time views of their financial positions and allow end of month closing to be done in hours not days. SAP did a table clean up. For example the very old Material Master Database Tables from R/2 times (MARA, …) are finally no longer around, only views on the data.

Few benefits envisaged by SAP simple finance are:


  • Month/ Quarter/ Year End Closing- Reduction in number of steps to get actual results.
  • Allocation of costs to characteristics- In ECC, it normally takes 4-5 hours, depending upon data. However in Simple finance it happens at ultra high speed.
  • Sales Reports/ Plans- Based on historical data, which is also very time consuming. However Simple finance performs real-time profitability reporting on large data volumes. Conduct instant, on-the-fly analysis of profitability data at any level of granularity, aggregation, and dimension
  • Empower business users with easy self-service access to profitability information
  • Graphs on Financial implications of sale, along with logistics information on how many days outstanding etc.
  • Dramatically higher speeds and a 1:10 reduction in Data Footprint. Imagine – a 1 Terabyte SAP Database is down to 100 GB
  • SAP is offering Fiori for free, to allow for all SAP customers to leverage the enhanced user experience through innovative user interface across multiple devices.

So, SAP Simple Finance as the frontrunner of SAP S/4HANA


  • Provides instant financial insight with highest flexibility
  • Demonstrates the paradigms underlying S/4HANA, most importantly, the simplification
  • Offers accelerated and simplified processes, based on a simple data model following the principle of a single source of truth, all with a simple and intuitive user experience
  • Provides functionality that is comparable to the well-known scope of SAP ERP Financials in a non-disruptive manner