Central Finance: Configuration

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Central Finance
With Central Finance, you can transition to a centralized SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition 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.

This allows you to establish a Central Reporting Platform for FI/CO with the option of creating a common
reporting structure. Additionally, selected financial processes can be executed centrally in this system. To
prepare common reporting structures, you can map your different accounting entities (for example,
account, profit center, or cost center) in your source systems to one common set of master data in the
central system. You can then replicate financial accounting and management accounting postings to
your Central Finance system.

In your SAP S/4HANA system, FI documents and CO postings are combined into one document; the
universal journal entry. In addition, all cost elements are part of the chart of accounts. Before you replicate
CO postings to the Central Finance system, you need to make sure that accounts are available for all cost
elements. You can also replicate certain cost objects (for example, internal orders) to the Central Finance
system.

In a typical set-up, multiple source systems are connected to one System Landscape Transformation
Replication Server which in turn is connected to one Central Finance system.

Where can I find more information?

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Note
Terminology: Journal Entry vs. Accounting Document

Please note that the following information applies only to English.

In SAP S/4HANA, the term journal entry replaced accounting document following a change in the
underlying financial architecture. While the basic concept – the accounting record for a business
transaction – is the same, journal entries enable a true integrated accounting system.

You may notice that you still see document or accounting document on the user interface and in the
documentation. Nevertheless, these accounting documents are actually journal entries since they are
based on the new architecture.