SAP Central Finance enables customers with more than one ERP system to replicate accounting documents from these ERP systems into a central Finance system running on SAP S/4HANA. In the SAP Central Finance system customer can leverage the capabilities of SAP HANA to achieve the organization-wide financial view with real-time reporting capabilities. SAP Central Finance is a part of S/4HANA and as it’s a deployment option so it’s not being implemented on a standalone CFIN box. There is no SAP implementable/installable product called CFIN rather it’s activated via business function on SAP S/4HANA box however Central Finance is a separate product with a dedicated license however Central Finance is part of SAP S/4HANA, and thus no additional installation is required.
The central SAP S/4HANA enables central execution of transactions, business planning, group consolidation, as well as reporting and analytics. It is a recommended deployment scenario for customers with a heterogeneous landscape without disrupting the existing (local) ERP systems and as a first step towards full S/4HANA adoption.
Central Finance consists of one physical document for real-time processing and analytics and merges FI and CO into a singular line item table for “single source of truth” known as the “Universal Journal”
A Central Finance posting looks the same as an SAP ERP financial posting but is linked back to the source system via reference to the document number & logical system ID of the source system
Central Finance takes advantage of being on S/4HANA and ad-ons like Advanced Financial Close, Intercompany Matching & Reconciliation (ICMR), and Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM), Credit Management can be implemented on top of S/4HANA and data from all source systems can be exploited for processing.
Limitations on Central Finance
- Asset Accounting document replication is not supported
- Postings to CO-FI reconciliation ledger (GL Reconciliation Postings)
- Year-end closing postings where the reference transaction (AWTYP) is GLYEC
- Clearings are not transferred as part of the initial load, but you can activate the transfer of clearings via ongoing replication.
- Clearing resets are not transferred as part of the initial load but you can activate the transfer of clearing resets via ongoing replication.
- Recurring entries & Sample documents
- Noted items (apart from down payment requests and payment requests)
- Parked documents & Balance carry forward items
Benefits of Central Finance
- Improve data transparency – Establish a single source of truth for consistent reporting and analysis with an audit trail and drill-down to source transactions in SAP and third-party systems.
- Create efficient, cost-effective processes – Integrate, standardize, and automate processes; reduce costs for processing methods; shorten cycle times; and re-deploy labor to higher value-added activities.
- Take an agile approach to transformation – Realize your cross-entity cost optimization and market and growth potential when you want and at your own pace.
- Real time replication
- Simplified reporting
- Single source for consolidation
- Non-Disruptive migration to S/4HANA
- Implementation of Central Processes like – Central Payments, In house Cash for working Capital, Central Receivables
Prepare SAP ERP source system for Central finance
- All ERP releases that are still in maintenance are supported (ECC 600 and later)
- Any SAP S/4HANA system is also supported as source system
However to make the source system (ECC or S/4HANA) ready for SAP Central Finance help there is a set of OSS notes need to be implemented which changes based on current ERP release. Please refer to OSS note – 2323494 for more details
Last Update: August 17, 2023