Central Finance (also known as CFin) allows businesses to integrate their financial platforms into SAP S/4HANA at a gradual transition, instead of embarking on an intensive upfront data migration.
How Can Central Finance Help You?
As we near 2027 and SAP customers continue planning their transition from ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA, many want to take advantage of the process improvements promised with SAP S/4HANA Finance. For businesses that seek to avoid long and expensive migration projects or that need to maintain a multi-ERP system landscape, one popular route is Central Finance.
By deploying Central Finance, businesses can make a non-disruptive transition from their existing ERP landscape rather than preemptively migrating all their data from one system to another. Central Finance implementations involve a replication process throughout the entirety of your records—achievable across IT systems and agnostic with regard to business models.
Once this mapping has been accomplished, moving data to separate applications for financial processes like reporting, planning, and consolidation is no longer necessary since these processes are already embedded in the Central Finance system. You can jump right in and utilize many of SAP S/4HANA’s in-memory, predictive, cloud, and machine learning innovations common to the new suite.
So are you ready to make the switch or looking for guidance on how? Our Central Finance and SAP S/4HANA book will help you make the transition.
What Will This Book Teach You?
With this book, you’ll explore what Central Finance brings to finance systems and how it can improve your financial processes and reporting. You’ll also discover how Central Finance fits into your IT landscape, and learn how to set up Central Finance using best practices for implementation.
Central Finance Basics
Learn why Central Finance has been described as the “silver bullet” solution and discover industry leaders’ motivation behind implementation.
Explore the improvements that can occur throughout your finance processes. You’ll dip into deployment options, and get an idea as to where Central Finance fits in your overall landscape.
Central Finance Implementation
Walk through the concepts behind the system architecture and the options you have when deploying Central Finance and its many components. Follow step-by-step implementation instructions for your Central Finance project to perform system setup, data integration, replication, master data, initial load preparation, and execution.
The book also covers technology options for master data management to maintain and map data outside of, but necessary for, Central Finance.
Next Steps after Central Finance
The book explores how Central Finance facilitates system integration for companies that undertake mergers and acquisitions. If your organization is considering leveraging Central Finance as the first step toward SAP S/4HANA, or taking the opportunity to revisit its finance and platform transformation goals, this resource will act as your roadmap.
Finally, to help you develop your Central Finance business case, the book helps you identify the potential impact on people, roles, and your IT organization; considerations for developing business value, cost, and relevant value drivers; challenges to anticipate; and how to achieve your desired return on investment.
Other Highlights Include
- Architecture
- Finance processes
- Entity and group reporting
- Project planning
Who Is This Book For?
If you’re currently working with SAP S/4HANA and Central Finance or are looking to transition financial processes from an existing ERP system, you’ll benefit from the insight this book has to offer. This book will appeal to finance managers, business users, project and change managers, consultants, and implementation teams that are familiar with enterprise finance software concepts.
About the Authors
Carsten Hilker is a global solution owner for Central Finance. He is the host of the annual SAP Financial Excellence Forum, an event for SAP customers to network and interact with domain experts and thought leaders in finance and management accounting.
Javaid Awan is a global solution owner for Central Finance and machine learning for finance, and is a qualified accountant with more than 25 years of hands-on experience in software applications.
David Dixon is a partner at TruQua Enterprises. He has been a featured speaker worldwide at SAPinsider conferences.
Marc Six is a principal consultant and the SAP S/4HANA and Central Finance practice lead at TruQua Enterprises.
How to Purchase
If you’re interested in purchasing Central Finance and SAP S/4HANA, follow this link and choose the format that works best for you: e-book, print edition, or bundle (both e-book and print).
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