The SAP Simple Finance add-on 1.0 for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA extends the scope of typical financial applications in order to serve various internal and external stakeholders. In times of volatile markets, margin pressure, and sophisticated regulatory requirements, companies need a precise view of the past, immediate insight into the present, and a clear perspective of the future. The add-on comes with optimized financial accounting processes and supports the operational finance experts driving efficiency and compliance.

This requires a new way to run the business in real-time based on real-time processes and data. The add-on provides lean data architecture, real-time insights, and a beautiful user experience.

The add-on is based on line items as a single source of truth for operational reporting and planning. This model provides all transactional details to reporting in real-time without the need to extract and duplicate data in reporting-oriented data structures. As all data is available on this granularity, reporting requests can be handled on an ad-hoc basis. Combining line items in accounting, ongoing transactions not yet reflected in accounting, and planning data helps to answer questions such as "What has happened?", "Why did it happen?", "What is happening now?", "What will happen next?".

Based on SAP HANA technology, the system provides all kinds of requested aggregated financial information on the fly using views, which are based on granular line item data. There is no need to keep persistent storage of aggregates and indices. Due to this, it is much simpler and faster to adapt the system to cope with changes in business and corporate structures. Business flexibility on one hand and accounting stability on the other are no longer a contradiction.

For operational processes especially in financials, a high degree of automation is a clear target. Transferring operational data into the financial application is based on rules defined once, which also include complete exception-based error handling and correction. The add-on assists the experts in finding the root cause for the exceptions with advanced search and rules engine support.