SAP Public Sector Budget Planning & Analysis: Recent Innovations

Updated on: 29th November, 2022

SAP continues investing in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Sector Management (also on-prem) to support public sector budget planning.

SAC and SAP S/4HANA Cloud are a perfect conjunction to deliver seamless budget planning and execution to your agency. While SAP S/4HANA Cloud serves as a major source of your financial insights, SAC can connect to its master & transactional data to perform agile planning and communicate your plan data back. SAC can also access live actuals and commitments transactional data in S/4HANA Cloud to offer real-time budget execution reporting.

In this blog, we will cover the most important product innovations to date.

Integration

Cloud

Here is the list of APIs available with S/4HANA Cloud 2111 release. They allow you to read master and transactional data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud system. These services are based on the OData protocol. They include:

On-prem

Here is the list of APIs available with 2021 S/4HANA Feature Package 1 Release (available since February 23rd, 2022). It includes:

• Budget Period API
• Budget Period Hierarchy API
• Commitment and Actual Items API
• Commitment Item API
• Fund API
• Fund Hierarchy API
• Funded Program API
• Funded Program Hierarchy API
• Funds Center API
• Funds Center Hierarchy API
• Funds Management Budget Document Item API
• Funds Management Functional Area API
• Grant API
• Grant Hierarchy API

Import of plan and forecast data from SAC to Funds Management Budget Control System (BCS) is also possible via a newly available API that came to market together with SAP S/4HANA 2022 release (an Excel upload is also an option: read more here).

Copy of CO planned data from S/4HANA ACDOCP (by planning category, financial ledger, periods, account assignments) to BCS is also available (read more here).

Public Sector Budget Planning & Analytics Content

Budget Planning

To accelerate your start with SAC for your budget planning SAP has delivered a template budget planning content to showcase SAC and S/4HANA Cloud integration. Starting February 19th, 2022, the content has been constantly updated and has been available for download to any customers with a running SAC license. You can explore the package here and find more technical information on the user guide.

In a nutshell, the package covers the following scope:

1-Operational Expense Planning (OPEX)

• Analyzing actuals, budget and plan of the last fiscal years – based on fund, cost center, and budget account (if a customer is using S/4 on-prem, the account assignments can be changed accordingly, for example, cost center -> fund center, budget account -> commitment item, and respective new OData services listed in the top of the article can be leveraged)
• Planning different versions of the next fiscal year’s budget based on last fiscal year’s numbers of choice
• Comparing the planning versions
• Finalizing selected plan and exporting it back to SAP S/4HANA Cloud

2-Revenue Planning (similar scope to OPEX above)

3-Project Planning (planning based on SAP S/4HANA WBS element level)

SAP will continue advancing this content package both in terms of the scope of business processes covered and well as business capabilities prepared out of the box. 

Budget Execution Analytics

On top of the planning package, SAP is also making available SAC standard content for budget execution analytics and KPI reporting. This package has been also available on SAC Content Library since February 19th, 2022.You can explore the package here and find more technical information on the user guide.

Since Q3, 2022 the funded and sponsored FTE view is available, connecting SAC to SAP SuccessFactors.

This package has the following scope:

1. Budget Monitoring – Budget Consumption Dashboard:

• Budget allocation details
• Budget consumption details
• Budget availability details

2. Fund Monitoring – Fund Overview

• Fund type, fund balance, profit & loss amount for each fund
• Fund assets details
• Funded FTEs

3. Grantee Management – Grant Overview

• Sponsor overview
• Grant overview with total grant budget, number of grants per grant type, etc.
• Sponsored assets overview
• Sponsored FTEs

Starting January 2022, the above content (except FTE view) has been available as SAC Embedded analytics directly in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Sector Management:

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Additional resources:

• How to work with business content in SAC
• SAC extended content inventory