My Favourite Innovations in S/4HANA 2020

First of all: Finally, an easy-to-explain release numbering for On-premise S/4HANA releases. From 2020 onwards it just the year, nothing else. I like it! Let’s hope they won’t change their mind at SAP and this year we will see a S/4HANA 2021 release.

The release highlights are already shared by SAP. I will focus on some key areas including Finance and highlight the, to me, most interesting new features in S/4HANA Core.

You will first find a summary of points followed by a detailed explanation per topic.

Global Highlights

Financial Accounting

New Type of GL account: Bank Reconciliation account to reduce the use of GL accounts for bank account
Enhancements in Global Accounting Hierarchies

Management Accounting

Universal Allocations: Latest releases with top-down distribution in margin analysis
New Fiori app Reassign cost and revenues
New Fiori app Manage direct activity allocation

Sales

Excel upload for condition maintenance
Workflow for Quotation, order, and credit memo request
Create preliminary billing documents
Flexible document numbering for customer billing document
New App: Customer Overview Page
New App: Pricing Elements Flexible Analysis
Manage Customer Returns Workflow

Data Migration

New migration approach and migration objects in Migration Cockpit

Financial Accounting

Reduce the number of General Ledger accounts for bank accounts

Simplify your payment process by connecting new house bank accounts to a new type of GL account, which is a bank reconciliation account
Assign a GL account with this new GL account type to more than one house bank account and thereby reduce the number of GL accounts needed for your payment process
Cash position reports can still be displayed per bank account

Enhancements in Global Accounting Hierarchies

Import from flexible hierarchies

Import Flexible Hierarchy into Global Hierarchy. In other words, you will be able to re-use the already created alternative hierarchies as a standard hierarchy.

Change Log support

Changes made in the global accounting hierarchies app are logged so old and new values can be compared and the change history is saved.

Dynamic reclassification based on maturity

This functionality will make it much easier to classify FsV items based on maturity. For example short term and long-term liabilities.

Multiple Language support

Now it’s finally possible to translate your FsV or other global hierarchy nodes to others languages.

Management Accounting

Universal Allocations

Universal Allocations are initially released in S/4HANA 1909. You can check out the following blogs to learn more about the general idea of universal allocations:

The updated roadmap of the universal allocation’s solution for this year:

Top-down distribution for Margin Analysis

The top-down distribution for COPA functionality is added to the universal allocation app in 2020.

Data is not always posted and available on the lowest possible level. For example, revenue is posted on the lowest level, but costs are not always available on that same level:

Cost by-product and margin by product questions cannot be answered.

Top-down distribution example by referencing the revenue data:

New Allocation context introduced and available in the Manage Allocations App:

Manage Direct Activity Allocation

This app is providing the functionality of GUI transactions KB21n, KB23n, KB24n, KB65, KB66, and KB67.

Features:

The display posted activity allocations
Create/copy/reverse/repost direct activity allocation
Mass upload from Excel
Graphical display of allocation flow
Posting to profitability segment allowed
Mass reversal and reposting

Reassign Cost and Revenues

This app is providing the functionality of GUI transactions KB11n, KB13n, KB14n, KB41n, KB43n, KB15n, KB16n, and KB17n.

Features:

Display of posted reassignments.
Create/copy/reverse reassignment documents.
Mass upload from excel.
Automatic derivation of GL account type
Mass reversal

Sales

Excel upload for condition maintenance

Workflow for Quotation, order, and credit memo request

Create preliminary billing documents

Preliminary billing documents for negotiation purposes based on items in the billing due list. You can change prices, attachments, and text for example. Output can be created for preliminary billing documents like final billing documents.