Book review: SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis (SAP Press)

Another review on yet another SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) book? Oh yes! This time I read SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis, again by SAP Press, and I was very glad to see this 450+ pages strong book on SAC Planning being announced some time ago. 

Few may know that planning is actually the original pillar that SAC was built on. Back in 2015, the very first version of SAC was called SAP Cloud for Planning and it was aimed at being a pure SaaS planning solution! Nowadays the focus of most users may be on reporting and analytics in SAC stories and applications, using the live data connections instead of acquired data models, but still plannings is an important part of SAC. So I think it’s good to have a dedicated book for this, especially as certain SAC planning concepts are completely different from the reporting and analytics side of SAC. Think of designing and managing acquired planning models vs. using live models, working with different data versions, planning-specific features as data actions, allocations, using the built-in calendar, etc.

What I like is that not just the technical options are listed in this book, but also the overall processes in financial planning are introduced and explained. What are we actually trying to achieve here, who is involved and what are the steps? This makes it so much easier to grasp the concepts and (technical) solutions that are offered in SAC. By the way, the sales planning sample scenario that is used throughout the book is based one of the business content packages for SAC: Sales Planning for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (SAP Best Practices). Unfortunately I only figured this out after going through almost the full book, as only at the very end there is a chapter on several business content samples. But it could be helpful if you’d want to try a couple of things yourself, without having to build up a complete model first, load the data etc.

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Video: SAP Analytics Cloud Currency Conversion Measures in New Model [2021.22]

Earlier this year the “new” model was introduced in SAP Analytics Cloud. Basically the main difference is that we now can work in a measure-based setup while the “classic” model was account-based.

Let’s have a look how we can work with multiple currencies in such a “new” model.