SAP Smart Financials 1.0

We see the next evolution of SAP Business Suite on HANA for Financials in Smart Financials 1.0

SAP Smart Financials 1.0 has new functional features, thanks to the underlying SAP HANA. The is to have

• More granularity for better reporting, and
• Faster close (by removing the reconciliation effort)

SAP Smart Financials is not just a technical change, to implement a good Change Management strategy and high adoption rate is required.

Financial Planning with SAP Smart Financials 1.0

1. The one area which interests me is Financial Planning, Smart Financial data is not available in ERP (as of release 1.0) . This is not a major issue if users report variance in BI. (The release note says the data is stored in BI). 
2. Any processing of financial planning is not supported. This implies users loose 'Integrated' planning scenarios in ERP. It is not good news for clients which use the Integrated Financial Planning feature in SAP ERP.

This above changes should not be a surprise as SAP has been commited on SAP EPM as the planning solution.

To read more about the release note click here SAP Smart Financial Release Notes. Select SAP solutions > SAP ERP Add-Ons > Smart Financials

Comparison of SAP Smart Financials, New GL and Old GL

	Smart Financials 1.0 (SAP ERP on HANA) (2013)	New General Ledger (2005)	Old General Ledger
	Compatible with New GL only
Data Storage	Document tables and line item tables	Document tables, line item tables, indexes	Document tables, line item tables, indexes, has different FI/CO tables
Totals table	None, no inconsistencies between FI documents and totals tables	Yes along with document/line item tables	Yes along with document/line item tables
Views	Tables (index) are replaced by views. View are available for BSIS, BSAS, GLTO, FAGLFLEXT
Special Purpose Ledgers (SPL)	Not available	Available, Can use ‘Ledgers’ concept	Available
Credit Management	Recommends FSCM-Credit Management (FSCM-AR)	FSCM-AR, FIN-AR-CR	FSCM-AR*, FIN-AR-CR
Asset Accounting	New Asset Accounting replaces Classical Asset Accounting	Classical Asset Accounting	Classical Asset Accounting
Constraints	-          Balance Sheet Planning no longer available -          Reports for comparing planning data and actual data in Profit Center Accounting -          Destruction of data or deletion of FI documents (Information Lifecycle Management)

New Features in SAP Smart Financials 1.0

New Asset Accounting: Ledger Approach and Accounts Approach

·         With Smart Financials both the actual values of the leading valuation and the values of parallel valuation in real time.

Line Item Based Controlling with Period Close Optimizations (Enhanced) 

Variance Calculation for Cost Centers (Changed)

·         Option to process the controlling area currency only or both the controlling area currency and the cost object currency.

·         The execution time for processing the controlling area currency only is around half that required for processing the controlling area currency and object currency

WIP Calculation and Results Analysis (Changed)

·         The production orders are valued at actual cost for the selected plant with the defined legal valuation for a single result analysis version

·         Customer enhancement and WIP calculation for product cost collectors and process orders are not supported

·         Multiple valuations is not supported

Variance Calculation for Production Orders (Changed)

·         Accelerated collective variance calculation on production orders compares the target costs (in the form of standard costs) with the control costs (actual cost less scrap cost) of all production orders in the plant, and assigns the resulting variances to variance categories

Smart Financials Reporting (New)

·         Line items reports supported SAP HANA

Integrated Business Planning (New)

·         In the first release of this new planning solution, the development of functionality has been focused on enabling plan data capturing in a very user-friendly way.

·         If further plan data processing is necessary, releasing them to the classic FI/CO plan data tables may be considered in future releases