SAP FICO and SAP S/4HANA Finance are two prominent ERP solutions offered by SAP. They are highly configurable, flexible, and scalable. These two software packages share a lot of similarities, possessing a lot of similar scopes, covering the complete finance cycle, and having comparable functionalities. However, there are still significant differences. In this blog post, we’ll outline the difference between SAP FICO and SAP S/4HANA Finance.
What is SAP FICO?
SAP FICO is an integrated SAP software solution that focuses on the entire business process of finance accounting and management accounting. It includes financial planning, controlling, consolidation, and reporting as well as specific functions for treasury and tax accounting.
SAP FICO is based on the concept of role-based responsibility; every user has access to only those functions relevant to their job.
Among various other things, SAP FICO enables you to:
- Manage your business processes efficiently with best-practice templates and wizards
- Create new financial models quickly with prebuilt data models
- Modify existing models without programming skills
- Simulate scenarios quickly without any programming skills
What is S/4HANA Finance?
SAP S/4HANA Finance is a comprehensive suite of finance and accounting applications that helps you run your business better and more efficiently. It offers a complete set of financial management capabilities across all business functions, including the core financial management, procurement, and contract management, supply chain management and logistics, project accounting, employee benefits management, tax accounting, and reporting.
Among various other things, SAP S/4HANA Finance enables you to:
- Organize and structure your data in a way that makes sense for your business
- Simplify data entry by using smart data capture tools
- Automate repetitive tasks through intelligent automation capabilities
SAP FICO vs. SAP S/4HANA Finance
SAP FICO is a comprehensive financial management solution that helps you improve your business processes. It provides transparent and accurate information on financial performance, taking into account the big picture of your enterprise.
SAP S/4HANA Finance is a new suite of applications for managing your company’s finances and operations. It combines finance and accounting with procurement, sales and logistics, customer relationship management, and manufacturing to give a complete view of your organization’s financial health.
SAP FICO is based on R/3 architecture while SAP S/4HANA Finance is based on HANA architecture and cloud-ready technology. This means the latter is easy to deploy in any environment including private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
SAP FICO is built around transactional data and uses a relational database. On the other hand, SAP S/4HANA Finance is based on analytical data and relies on in-memory technology (IMDS).
Final words
There are several other differences between SAP FICO & SAP S/4HANA Finance. If you want to learn more, sign up for the relevant courses of Tekskilled, a leading SAP specialized training organization. Check out its courses here.
