UPA & Asset Accounting in S/4HANA (Part 4): Focus on Fiori

Blog Series:
UPA & Asset Accounting in S/4HANA (Part 1): Introduction
UPA & Asset Accounting in S/4HANA (Part 2): Fixed Asset Overview
UPA & Asset Accounting in S/4HANA (Part 3): New Fixed Asset Master

Amongst all of the changes in UPA Fixed Assets, there are two that stand out to me as the most significant. 

The first was covered in the previous blog (UPA & Asset Accounting in S/4HANA (Part 3): New Fixed Asset Master) where I introduced the new fixed asset master record.  Designing a new technical solution for the master record has been a very long time coming but because it’s the starting point for all transactional processing and then reporting, SAP doesn’t move quickly in this area.

The other big change happens to be an extension of the first one so it makes sense to talk about it now.

Overview of Changes

Currently, throughout the SAP Finance solution, I can choose either SAPGUI or Fiori to do a given process.  The one exception that I’m aware of (but I’m sure there are others) is in the area of Bank Account Management.  Outside of that, I can choose either tool and always end up going with SAPGUI because my navigation and workflow is so much faster.  I’m an old dog as measured by SAP years and prefer SAPGUI… and honestly, I haven’t met anyone in my network who doesn’t feel the same way.  But I’m on guard about this because SAP continues to make improvements in Fiori and the FI-AA team seems to design new apps every few years.  Both require my attention because it’s clear that SAP is committed to Fiori as the final frontend tool.  Given their ‘principle of one’, it’s reasonable to assume that the days are numbered for SAPGUI.

With the introduction of UPA, SAP’s intent with the UI change for Fixed Assets is more comprehensive as it represents the start of a total move away from SAPGUI.  SAP intends to get all end-user activity in Fiori.  No more transaction codes or menus to memorize, just a more curated and re-designed set of tiles in Fiori to handle everything in this topic area.  This includes all posting transactions, reporting, and period-end activities in addition to the master data I talked about earlier.

As you’ll read below, they’ve accomplished this already for asset reporting (and for the master data per the earlier blog).  For the time being, you can still make postings and execute the period-end jobs on both sides…  but this probably won’t last long as SAP continues to build out the capabilities of UPA Fixed Assets in Fiori.

Overview of Manage Fixed Assets

First, let me review the basic structure and organization of the new Fiori apps.  All of the new apps are found in a new space with a 4 part sub-space (not sure what the exact SAP phrase is for this drop-down menu that appears).

The Overview section consists of just two apps with the Manage Fixed Assets app being the most important.  I covered most of its features in the previous blog but didn’t call out that this is now the go-to starting place for just about all asset processing.  If you have an issue with an asset, you’ll probably start here to look at its valuation (which replaces the Asset Explorer) or to review the master record itself.  It’s also a quick way to get a basic list of assets per class, cost center, legacy asset number, profit center, etc.

This is probably a good time to review that in the early versions of S/4HANA and Fiori, SAP mirrored the new Fiori apps with the transaction codes we had in SAPGUI.  The transactions were activity-dependent so we had separate ones for creating, changing, displaying, deleting, and blocking the asset.  There were separate transactions for each type of asset posting… several different acquisition based transactions, retirements, depreciation adjustments, revaluation, etc.  All of this was replicated over to Fiori so that we had 20+ different apps to maintain and post to a fixed asset.

Now, nearly all of these are replaced with the Manage Fixed Assets app which results in a far more streamlined and more easily accessible way to handle nearly all asset master data and transaction posting activity.

The other tile in this area is labeled Asset Accounting Overview.  This is an analytical dashboard app that shows a variety of KPIs such as the selected asset balance, expected depreciation to be posted, asset origin, and a quick links navigation area.  There are 14 delivered cards that can be displayed.

Postings

The postings page has the below tiles related to the typical asset transaction postings.  Other than the 2nd tile Post Asset Acquisition, all of these tiles are just the SAPGUI based transactions being rendered in Fiori.  There’s no need to review those and I’ll come back to the acquisition posting app later below.

Periodic Activities

This area has dedicated apps for period-end closing, validation/substitution management, and all of the asset reports.  There’s quite a lot to talk about on this tab.  I don’t think I’ll touch the validation/substitution solution here as that probably warrants its own separate blog.

For the Jobs apps, SAP has a new unified way to schedule and monitor fixed asset related jobs rather than using separate apps for running or recalculating depreciation.  The process to call them has also been streamlined from what we had before.  Previously we would have the usual selection criteria to execute the depreciation run or the fiscal year close.  Then we had to execute it in the background (Why?  With the HANA db, I no longer care about any performance burdens on the system.  That’s not my problem).  Then I had to go through these annoying two windows to tell SAP how and when I wanted to schedule the job (which was a total waste of time because it’s always immediate) and then how I wanted it printed (news flash: I didn’t care… no one cares about spool lists and no one prints out job results anymore).  All of that has changed.

There is now a new UI to get these jobs scheduled and monitored. The three available job types are the Depreciation Run, Depreciation Recalculation, and the Fiscal Year Close. 

You can then see a list of all of the previously defined jobs, their status, and the results.  In the example below, I’ve successfully posted depreciation but seem to have an error with the recalc, and the FY Close is currently running.  The only negative that I see with this is that the final results are displayed using the SAPGUI spool.  I was expecting another native Fiori screen/app with a list of assets that were processed.  Hopefully that gets changed.

Legacy Data Transfer

This page has a small number of tiles dedicated to the asset legacy conversion process.  The three in the Postings area are all SAPGUI based transactions (ABLDT, ABSOL, and AB08).  The first one is essentially transaction AS91 but it’s a true/native Fiori app.

The Manage Legacy Assets app operates in a very similar manner as the Manage Fixed Assets app.  It starts with a worklist and from there you can initiate the creation process of a single legacy asset.  You can then post to it using the Post Transfer Values app above.

Reporting

The biggest thing to know in this topic area is that like with the master data, all FI-AA reporting has to be done in Fiori now.  If I go back to SAPGUI to the Easy Access Menu, there is no folder for Reporting or Information Systems in Fixed Assets Any longer.

OK, fine.  I’ll just run transaction code [AR01] or [AR02] directly.  But that brings up this message:

So, there’s no way to run any of the ‘legacy’ reports in FI-AA anymore.  It’s Fiori-only from here on out but that’s a good thing as the old reports do not benefit from running on HANA.

Looking at the earlier screenshot with the Reporting tiles, there are now 5 tiles dedicated to reporting and if you’re at all familiar with SAP’s reports in the FI-AA subledger, these should all be recognizable.  The fifth one, Asset Accounting Overview, is the same dashboard that you can access from the Overview page.

The other four are, again, similar to how the old SAPGUI ABAP list reports that we’ve run for decades now.  But these are all brand new and true Fiori apps.  I’ll probably dive into these in a separate blog because SAP has completely changed how they do reporting now.  It’s not just a change in application or technology (though that applies here beecause these aren’t ABAP based reports) or the toolset.  There are some other new items from the Universal Journal and how SAP tags all of our asset line items with identifiers to be used in reporting later on. 

For now I’ll just show one of the reports and that will be the Asset Transactions report.  This is completely new and now gives me a flat listing of all of the asset line items.  There are 94 different attributes I can include in the columns, 77 fields I can select on, and I can also easily export it to Excel with a single click.  This is a big improvement over the structure based reports and their transaction specific (acquisition, transfer, retirement) nature SAP had prior to UPA.

Asset Acquisition Posting

Now that I’ve covered each page, let me head back and cover how we can make a basic asset acquisition. 

In the past, SAP had 7 dedicated SAPGUI transactions to manage all of the different ways to post an acquisition. In UPA Fixed Assets, there are just two tiles and I’m only considering one of them.  The second one is Create Supplier Invoice which is really a Purchasing/AP tile and not asset focused.  I want to mention that while you can run your acquisitions through the procurement process, you shouldn’t.  As an exception, it’s fine to run an ocassional acquisition through a vendor but that’s not the best way to post asset acquisitions as a core process. So, that leaves us with the Post Asset Acquisition tile.  This tile is completely new by the way.

The reason I wanted to wait before talking about this tile is that you can also bypass it completely!  You can trigger the acquisition (and other common asset posting transactions) from the Manage Fixed Assets app.  When you are working with a worklist of asset records, you can go to the menu below to trigger the posting.  So far, this is the way that I’m initiating the majority of my postings as I keep working with the solution.

After the app launches, the below screen appears.  All of the expected fields are here… different dates, transaction type, header text, amount, and the ledger/depreciation area fields if I wanted to specify the posting to a specific one.

The asset line items that are posted per ledger and area are in the next section further down.

After the posting is made, there are links available to view the impacted GL accounts in a T-account view that is really slick. 

Asset Valuation

As part of this effort with UPA Fixed Assets, SAP has decided to replace the Asset Explorer with a new app… though it’s not a standalone app.  You access it by first pulling up the asset that you want to work with from the initial worklist area of the Manage Fixed Assets app.

Shown below is the initial screen for this asset.  A lot of this should look familiar as nearly every function from AW01N is now here.  I can view the aggregate asset balances, specific transactions, depreciation details including a monthly depreciation schedule, and compare asset values across ledgers and areas.  I can also display the depreciation trace (highlighted in red) as well as trigger a recalculation.  The recalculation is done in memory and not written to the appropriate tables which is why it says Simulate.  This is an improvement over the button at AW01N that it replaces.

My Thoughts

SAP is getting better at designing these new apps though I can’t honestly compare them to prior releases because I haven’t intensively used them.  Every S/4HANA OP implementation I’ve been on has used SAPGUI unless they had to use Fiori (as I mentioned at the top with BAM).  That said, these new apps look a lot better, perform faster, and are more comprehensive in nature.  The older ones were very fragmented so once you created an asset, you had to back up to the launchpad and find the next app to launch.  Now, most of that processing can be done in just one app. 

Do I like it?  No, not really.  Maybe I will one day but for now I work much faster in SAPGUI and prefer it.  Transaction codes and keyboard shortcuts go a long way and SAP’s decision to push everything to a browser where screen rendering and transitions seem to take a brief moment to execute… well, it ends up slowing me down.

Outro

That’s it for this blog!  Honestly, I could have included another 20 screenshots of some of these screens but this was already becoming too long of a post. And there’s still plenty to talk about with UPA and Asset Accounting!  I have about 6-7 more topics to cover…  so yeah, let’s stop here for now. 

As for the next one, I think I’ll either dive into the technical changes or possibly group assets… or possibly settlement!  I’m not sure but check back to find out!

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