SAP Simple Finance, based on SAP HANA is a set of integrated solutions that finance departments can now

run their mission-critical processes in real time — including planning, analysis, accounting, consolidation,
treasury, financial operations, risk and compliance.

One of the Key Components of SAP Simple Finance Add-On is Central Finance.

Here are the highlights of Central Finance.

With Central Journal or Central Finance, you can transition to SAP Simple Finance add-on for SAP Business
Suite powered by SAP HANA without disruption to your current system landscape, which can be made up
of a combination of SAP systems of different releases and accounting approaches and non-SAP systems.
Central Finance allows you to create a common reporting structure.
To prepare for this common structure, you must map your different accounting entities (for example,
account, profit center, or cost center) in your local systems to one common set of master data in the central
system. Then, you can replicate financial accounting (FI) and management accounting (CO) postings.
Some of the top features include:

-Central Accounting Interface

You can use the central accounting interface to harmonize master data and replicate postings.
You can map master data from several source systems to harmonized master data in the Central Finance
system either manually or using SAP MDG.

-Intercompany Reconciliation with Central Finance

As receivables and payables are replicated into Central Finance, intercompany reconciliation (ICR) can
access these receivables and payables directly in the Central Finance system without having to run long
batch jobs for loading the receivables and payables into Central Finance.

-Document Relationship Browser

Using the document relationship browser, you can see the document flow of an FI document. For example,
you can navigate back from an FI document to the original sales order.
You can also search for the reposted FI document using the company code, original document number, or
fiscal year from the source system.

-Harmonized Financial Reporting

Central Finance reporting provides harmonized financial reporting allowing you to report on financial
figures that originate in different source systems.

-Integrated Business Planning

Integrated Business Planning for SAP Simple Finance Add-On for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA
(IBP) can be combined with Central Finance to provide a consistent view of the planning process. Planning
applications can be accessed by a Microsoft Excel frontend to provide a homogeneous look and feel. Actual
data and master data are accessed directly in real time without any replication so there is no need to load
additional data warehouses.
Integrated business planning covers the following:
Expense planning
Profitability planning
Profit and loss planning
-SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office
In addition to classic SAP ERP reports such as financial statements, cash flow, or profitability reports, you
can use SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office for reporting. SAP Business Objects
Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office integrates with Microsoft Excel and helps you to gain insight into
business data and make intelligent decisions that impact corporate performance.

Central Finance System Landscape

Simple Finance is a Add-on and part of the system like New GL.
Central Finance is a deployment option and not a functionality within SAP S/4HANA. SAP introduced
it to simplify the process of adopting SAP S/4HANA Finance.
Central Finance is an SAP instance/system that have simple finance active, and it’s get the data from
the other SAP and non-SAP systems to report centrally.

Central Finance is aimed at reducing the cost of adoption of SAP S/4HANA Finance for organizations having
heterogeneous landscapes (multiple SAP ERP or non-SAP systems). With Central Finance, these
organizations no longer have to upgrade all the systems to have SAP S/4HANA Finance. Instead, they can
implement SAP S/4HANA Finance with one instance only.

http://sapexperts.wispubs.com/financials/articles/a-holistic-approach-to-implementing-central-
finance?id=c4386f83f76e4f6dba0302ff05228c73#.WjmGk_CnFJ8
https://www.truqua.com/the-top-10-things-to-know-about-sap-central-finance/

The Top 10 things to know about SAP Central Finance

If SAP Central Finance is a deployment option that you are considering for S/4HANA Finance, it’s important
to have a solid grasp on how it works. Keeping that in mind, I thought I’d do a recap of a recent session that
David Dixon presented at the Financials 2016 conference to highlight the 10 most important things you
need to know about Central Finance.

1. Formerly called the SAP Central Journal, Central Finance is a product and a deployment option for
S/4HANA Finance that breaks out the Finance and Controlling (FI/CO) applications for the rest of SAP ERP
as a sidecar via SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) replication .

2. Central Finance is a way to implement S/4HANA Finance without disrupting your existing source SAP ERP
systems (but does require installing a DMIS software component and SAP Notes)

3. As example use cases, Central Finance can be used as a functional migration option, a flexible reporting
platform for mergers and acquisitions, and a shared services system

4. Standalone BW and BPC investments require data transfer via batch Extract, Transform, and Load* (ETL)
jobs while Central Finance is via real-time replication of FI/CO documents

5. Fiori, HANA Live (or the new S/4HANA Analytics), SAP BW, and SAP BPC can all be integrated in real-time
at the document level with financial controls and integrity that come with general ledger in addition to error
and correction handling prior to posting via Application Integration Framework (AIF) functionality

6. Central Finance consists of one physical document for real-time processing and analytics and merges FI
and CO together into a singular line item table for “single source of truth” known as the “Universal Journal”

7. In Central Finance, the accounting interface is directly replicated to the Universal Journal which reduces
the need for reconciliation, integration, batch processing and data replication

8. Master data management is handled by Master Data Governance (MDG)

9. 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 key of the source document and logical system to which it
belongs

10. Central Finance is taking advantage of solutions that were already centrally managed such as Financial
Close Cockpit, Intercompany Reconciliation (ICR), and Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM).
Migration to SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA:

https://help.sap.com/doc/saphelp_sfin100/1.10/en-US/87/2f6152b82bf35fe10000000a423f68/frameset.htm

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/space/simple-finance