SAP Business One HANA offers some of the best technology available to help you manage your most important asset – CASH. Cash flow is the lifeblood of most small to medium sized businesses and a good cash flow forecast is the single biggest asset of a good finance manager. Let’s take a look at the SAP Business One HANA Cash Flow Forecast and discover how this SAP Business One HANA funciton can help improve your cash flow.

Let’s start with the cash flow challenge – there are lots of moving parts to a company’s cash flow. Cash in bank, debtors, creditors, open AP invoices, open AR invoices, open purchase orders, sales forecast and more. The number of potential transactions can make the cash flow forecast daunting – sometimes the traditional cash flow report takes so long to generate or check that the cash flow position has actually changed by the time a company can accurately report their cash flow position.

The solution – SAP Business One HANA Cash Flow Forecast:

The SAP Business One HANA cash flow forecast modelling provides a cash flow forecast based on several configurable measurements and criteria.

SAP Business One HANA cash flow forecast – choose your measures and criteria:

The measures allow a user to tick or untick certain elements to be included or excluded from the cash flow forecast. As an example the image above shows that the sales forecast measure has been ticked. As a result the cash flow forecast will include sales orders. If we un-tick the sales forecast option sales orders will be excluded from our cash flow forecast. The same is true of the criteria options – we have ticked the “consider delays in payments” option. As a result the SAP Business One HANA cash flow forecast will include these “delay in payment” indicators in the final net cash flow position. The delay in payment option is activated on the customer master – as per the image below. In this instance Earthshaker Corp usually pays us 10 days late. This late payment indicator will be used as part of the net cash flow calculation.

We can also adjust the certainty level of our cash flow forecast – by scrolling the “certainty level” scroll bar – as seen in the image below:The configuration allows users to set certainly levels for different document types and different accounts. In the below example we can see that we have different document types ranging from certainty level 1 (most certain) to certainty level 7 (least certain). This indicates that we are most certain about the cash available at level 1 – cash accounts, incoming payments and outgoing payments. We are least certain about the cash that will be paid and collected based on purchase orders and sales orders (level 7 – low certainty). This is because there is still a lot of risk associated with the cash collection when we are only at sales order stage. We still have to ship the goods, invoice the customer and receive payment – clearly there is some risk in that process. The user can decide which objects (purchase orders, sales orders etc.) should be allocated to which certainty levels.

SAP Business One HANA – cash flow forecast – setting your certainty levels:By sliding the certainty level bar from high to low we will see the impact on cash flow (by including or excluding certain higher risk elements in the cash flow).

The end result is a visual of the cash flow and a list of business objects (documents, accounts and payments) included in the cash flow. Different time periods can be seen by scrolling the time bar.As with other standard SAP Business One functionality a user can drill down to source transactions by clicking on the yellow arrow in the business objects table.

Imagine the amount of data that SAP Business One is sorting through to give you a snapshot of cash flow – taking into account thousands of different documents, accounts, orders and payments. This type of reporting is made available thanks to SAP Business One HANA – in memory technology. This HANA technology enables the analysis of large data volumes.

The demonstration of the SAP Business One HANA Cash Flow Forecast (below) will help you to see the solution in action.

Want quick, easy access to workflow, data and information based on your company workflow and business process………implement the SAP Business One Hana Workbench.

Users can include the SAP Business One HANA Workbench on their SAP Business One HANA Cockpit 

The SAP Business One HANA Workbench provides a graphical view of the business process for a user:The above example shows a typical SAP Business One purchasing process. A purchase request is raised, then a purchase order to start the purchasing process. A user gets a great visual of the process and can click on the relevant visual to drill down to that process in SAP Business One. A user can also click on the blue button to get other related information. In the above example the user has clicked on the purchase order related information to get additional information –

• An open items list / report
• A document drafts report
• A price list report
• A last prices report
• Other information that relates to the purchase order

The workbench editor allows you to customise the standard SAP Business One workbench widgets to your business processes and workflow. Using the above workbench example if your business does not start the purchasing process with a purchase request (the first step in the process might be a purchase order), then we can delete the purchase request from the workbench.

Standard SAP Business One HANA workbench widgets include:

• Purchasing process (as seen above).
• Sales process:
• Stock Management / Inventory process:
• Financials:If you are using SAP Business One HANA be sure to enable the workbench widgets – your users will thank you.

SAP Business One HANA offers in memory technology. This technology allows the SAP Business One version for HANA to search massive data volumes in milliseconds. Speed is everything when it comes to big data searches. Let’s introduce you to SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search – a practical example of how in memory HANA technology can be applied in a real life environment to search massive data volumes and give you the information that you want – when you want it.

The Enterprise search is available on the SAP Business One HANA platform. On the right hand side of the SAP Business One HANA cockpit. In practical terms let’s assume that we are searching for a specific customer quote which is still open / valid and was sent to Earthshaker (our customer) last week. Earthshaker Corporation is on the phone and we need to quickly locate the quotation in question to discuss the discounts and product availability with our customer – time is of the essence. The problem is that with so much data available how you find what you are looking for…….bring on the SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search.

We can start with a search of our customer name “Earthshaker Corporation”….this enterprise search will yield a result that includes all data, documents and other SAP Business One elements that are for our business partner / customer “Earthshaker Corporation”. Now let’s start the filtering process. First we filter by sales quotation – this yields 55 documents. We know that the sales quotation we are looking for is “open” – so we filter by open sales quotations. Next we choose a date range – the last 30 days.

SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search:

Now we have narrowed down our search to 2 sales quotations. We hover over the quotation to get more detail. We have now found the quotation that we were looking for. We open up the quotation directly from the SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search function and we can now review the quotation with our customer. The enterprise search and the associated filtering took a few seconds to run.

In summary SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search allows users to search the entire SAP Business One database with comprehensive filtering, summary and drill down to detailed document information as required. Quite simply the best ERP search facility available.

Once we have found the information that we are looking for using the SAP Business One HANA Enterprise Search we can offer our customer other detailed information using HANA reporting. For example if our customer wants to know more about product availability we might run the SAP Business One HANA Available to Promise check…..showing us when stock will be available to ship to our customer.

This is what we all dream of – quick, easy reporting without the need to employ the services of IT specialists. The answer – SAP Business One HANA – Interactive Analysis. Now I accept that there is no one single solution to all reporting requirements. Before recommending a reporting solution we need to ask a number of questions – do you want the report printed or on screen? Do you want static or analytical / dynamic reporting? Are you reporting on operational or financial data? Are you reporting from one or multiple databases? All great questions to ask before launching into a recommended solution for SAP Business One reporting. So where and when is SAP Business One HANA Interactive Analysis the right solution for your SAP Business One reporting requirements? When you want to write your own MS Excel Pivot Table Reports for quick slice and dice analysis.

The question I often get asked is – can I write my own reports. This question is usually asked by a finance manager who wants to create finance or operational reports for quick easy analysis. These reports are often not complex but without some basic knowledge of SAP Business One table structures and a reporting tool (even as simple as MS Excel Pivot tables) it becomes difficult to produce the report you want – in any ERP solution. SAP Business One has, over the years, given users several tools to help with the reporting challenge:

• Standard SAP Business One reports. Each functional area in SAP Business One has lots of standard reporting available – financial and operational reports.
• SAP Business One – “view system information” – a great SAP Business One function which allows users to easily identify table and field names required for reporting.
• SAP Crystal reports integrated into SAP Business One.

Now – another great SAP development for easy report writing – SAP Business One HANA – Interactive Analysis. There are number of reporting aspects to SAP Business One HANA:

• SAP Business One HANA cockpit
• SAP Business One HANA pervasive analytics
• SAP Business One HANA specific reports – cash flow forecast, delivery schedule management and available to promise.

In this blog let’s focus on the SAP Business One HANA Interactive Analysis. This is a new SAP Business One HANA feature – using MS Excel pivot tables to do ad hoc analysis reporting. Standard pre-defined interactive analysis includes:

• Sales revenue
• Sales opportunities
• Cost accounting
• Cost Center analysis
• Budget analysis

As you click on the menu – the MS Excel pivot table will open. Measures and dimensions which can be used to build your report are now available on the right hand side. As you click on the information (measures and dimensions) the information appears instantly in the MS Excel pivot table.

SAP Business One HANA – Interactive Analysis:Now for example break the information out by year by simply dragging the calendar year field into the “filter” area. Now you can work on your formatting – using standard MS Excel functionality to give your report the look and feel that you want.

Quick easy reporting from the team at SAP Business One HANA.

SAP Business One HANA Interactive Analysis Demo: