Welcome to the year 2102 and a new blog in this release information series. In this first release of 2021 we have several innovations with great benefits for the professional services industry.

You can find a collection on overall professional services insights for SAP S/4HANA Cloud in this collection blog.

As usual, in the video below you can find a short summary of the three most important highlights of this release, but in this blog, you will also find more innovations than just the three highlights.

Improvements to the billing process through partial write-offs and postponements

The new project billing functionality we introduced with 2008 in the scope item 4E9 is still not marked as standard scope item. This gives our customer the opportunity to test the new functionality and get familiar with it in the meantime.

But of course, also in this release there are innovations in this area, for instance the possibility to decide on partial write-offs and postponements during the bill preparation. This new functionality brings more flexibility in what gets billed to the customer in the end and therefore increases the acceptance of bills by the receiving customers.

A project billing specialist or billing team member is now able to partially write-off and postpone time and expense items. This allows the user to take more specific actions on write-off and postponement to the next billing cycle.

You can also find more information on the new project billing functionality in this blog post from Andreas Hammerschmidt.

This innovation applies to the scope item 4E9.

Speed up the billing process through billing preparation based on Billing Due Date

The second innovation in the area of our new project billing, enables a project billing specialist or billing team member to prepare billing directly based on the Billing Due Date instead of the date the user is looking in the system.

This of course, iincreases the usability and efficiency during project billing, reduces the time to bill and generally supports in speeding up the billing process

Same as before, you can also find more information on the new project billing functionality in this blog post from Andreas Hammerschmidt.

This innovation applies to the scope item 4E9.

Reduce project management costs by blocking specific intercompany postings

Next up let’s take a look into an innovation that is not only relevant for the professional services industry but can also support use cases in this area.

With this innovation we give key users the ability to block intercompany business processes for dedicated company code relationships so that cross-charging will not be possible for multiple CO-related transactions. Continued possibilities for intercompany billing and manual FI allocations.

This will be very valuable in reducing the number of inaccurate time confirmations, cost allocations, and effort needed to make the needed corrections.

This innovation applies to the scope item 4AN.

Utilization insights

Next up I want to reference to the new Resource Management functionality on SCP that natively integrates with the professional services scenario in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

As there are monthly releases on the SCP, let me address a new app that will be released in February. This app “View Resource Utilization” in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, resource management offers new capabilities to get the needed insights on planned utilization.

It supports resource managers in understanding the planned utilization for the project team members, also it helps in identifying conflicts like overbooking on time.

Flexible aggregation of data on customer invoices for project-based services

Next up I would like to get into a new functionality that our customers have been anticipating and that is now available with 2102.

It will increase the control over how relevant billing data for project-based services is structured on the customer invoice in order to satisfy their expectations.

You will be able to

• modify the corresponding output-form template according to your business requirements,
• define your own criteria for aggregation (for example, by product, employee, or work package), and the resulting output will have billing data grouped accordingly,
• leverage full flexibility in determining the grouping hierarchy (for example, group hours billed by work package for some customers, but group hours billed by consultant for other customers)
• create grouping hierarchies with up to three levels

This innovation applies to the scope item J14.

Reporting and process flexibility updates for revenue recognition in project-based sales and services

This next highlight is not only relevant in the context of the new WIP Details app, but this is what I am going to focus on in this blog.

As we have our new project billing functionality since a few releases now, I also wanted to highlight the new “WIP Details” app that has been added as well.

You might already be familiar with the previous version of this app, which is of course still available but only works in correspondence with the original billing functionality.

As both apps are currently in the system in parallel, you will find the original under the name “WIP Details” while the new app has the name “WIP Details (2)”.

This new app monitors the work-in-progress (WIP) details for project-based services in correspondence with the new project billing and helps users to evaluate the aging of the WIP. The app is based on real time data of the new project billing solution – enriched by data from the Universal Journal. It shows information such as WIP, billed revenue and manual accruals, allowing users to analyze profitability at an early stage.

This innovation applies to the scope items 1IL, 1P0, and 33O.

Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
• Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2102 Release Blog
• The Link Collection for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management here
• Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management Community
• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here
• Implementation Portal here

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