SAP Central Finance – A General Over View

The SAP S/4 HANA solution for Central Finance replicates financial accounting transactions in real time from SAP or non-SAP ERP source systems. Only financial transactions including those involving financial accounting, controlling posting and cost objects are replicated by Central Finance . With the opportunity to create a single reporting structure, Central Finance sets up a central reporting platform for SAP FI/CO.

The benefits offered by Central Finance are:

• Real time replication of all financial postings including the open items into Central Finance.
• Central Finance offers the ability to drill down information to the source systems and provides full traceability of postings.
• The universal journal entry of Central Finance is a single dataset, across multiple applications.
• Reduced time and effort required for reconciliation as all the financial data is available centrally in CFIN system for instant reporting.

Central Finance landscape architecture contains mainly 3 components/systems:

• The first system is the SAP ERP or the NONSAP ERP as the source system where the main business processes and FI/CO documents are posted
• The second system is the SAP SLT that acts as a middleware to read and replicate the FI and CO documents into CFIN system.
• The third system is the SAP Central Finance, commonly known as the target system that operates on SAP S/4 HANA where the FI and CO documents are re-posted or replicated from source system.

Additionally, there are two major tools/systems are used to support the digital migration of source financial information into CFIN, ther are AIF (Application Interface Framework) and MDG (Master Data Governance).

AIF is a tool used to Implement, monitor, and manage application interfaces from a central location to simplify interface handling across your system landscape. In Central Finance, AIF is mainly used for error handling. This comes free of cost along with SAP SLT license during CFIN project implementations.

SAP MDG helps the clients pull together all the master data in one place and manage it centrally using a master data management governance process. It enables businesses to easily separate their data and transfer it to source databases in the most optimized way. It is an integrated solution designed to help them manage master data across businesses.

The Central Finance splits the process of data replication into 2 parts:

1. Initial Load
2. Real Time Replications

Initial load is nothing but the posting of historical data from source systems to CFIN system from a specified period and the Real time Replication is posting of current source date on real time basis. Please follow me on my page for a detailed information on Initial Load and Real Time Replication.

The below clients or the customers who prefers to use SAP Central Finance –

1. Heterogeneous SAP landscapes with multiple ERP systems
2. Global multinational companies facing challenges during consolidations and group reporting
3. Faces huge challenges with High volume of financial data reconciliation during month end closing
4. Clients who wants to use top notch SAP technologies in quick time

The clients at the end enjoys numerous advantage provided by SAP through CFIN implementations such as –

1. Real Time Replication
2. Master Data Harmonization
3. Central Depository of all financial information
4. Use of Fiori Applications
5. Zero effort during month end closures
6. Effortless migration from Costing based COPA to Accounting Based COPA
7. Central Reporting
8. Central Payment
9. Within less time and cost, uses maximum SAP benefits and advance technologies offered by SAP

For detail information on SAP Central Finance and other blog posts on SAP, please follow me at https://sapforest.com.