What’s new? SAP Business ByDesign – November 2018

That SAP Business ByDesign Release 1811 includes innovations in the following areas:

Finance

• An interactive, customer-centric way of collecting accounts receivable has been added to receive amounts due while increasing customer satisfaction.

• New accounting standards (IFRS15 / ASC606) require companies to report sales with customers differently. SAP Business ByDesign now enables multiple sales documents to be defined as one revenue accounting contract with performance obligations in order to distribute the revenues according to standalone sales prices and to generate a report on contract objects, unsold receivables and contract liabilities.

Please see the videos on YouTube or SAP Media Share regarding the changes regarding IFRS15 / ASC606.

Customer relationship management

• An approval process can now be set up for service orders.
• The items of service orders can now be rearranged and renumbered in order to be able to define a certain sequence even after items have been deleted.
• Goods and invoice recipients are now also displayed in the overview of service orders.
• The invoice volume report now allows you to drill down to service order and service order item

Project management

• Time records can now also be assigned to other projects or project tasks retrospectively using a process that is transparent for everyone involved.

Supply chain management

• From now on, partial quantities of a customer requirement can be released. This allows planners to distribute the available number of items over several orders when goods are in short supply.
• The release of production orders can now be influenced depending on the production model.
• Products without inventory can now be included in the inventory. This means that all products that are physically in stock can be counted, even if there is no stock for a product in the system.

Human Resources

• Approvals of time records are now carried out as a background process. This means that project staff can work more smoothly in the graphical user interface, even with extensive approvals.
• A new report for evaluating working time accounts for vacation or overtime enables improved monitoring of overtime and simplifies the transfer of time account balances to payroll accounting.
• Reports required for payroll accounting are now more clearly structured. In addition, new data sources are available for integration into payroll accounting systems.

Integrated reporting

• You can now define your personal overview page and use it to compile important KPIs and reports for your personal needs. This is the first step in adding more powerful dashboarding functions to SAP Business ByDesign.
• You can now arrange your cards on overview pages according to your needs using the personalization mode using drag & drop
• Key users can now define bookmarks that enable business users to jump immediately to a view and selection in reports.
• Key users can now define filters for KPIs. For example, KPIs can be filtered by region.
• Linked, combined and cloud data sources can now be copied.

mobile

Release of a new smartphone app on iOS and Android with a new look and feel and new functions:

• View KPIs on the smartphone launchpad and with a separate KPI app and use every report view on your smartphone as well.
• Create and track expense reports and shopping carts.
• 360 ° view for the most important key figures, address and contact details including activity management for tasks and phone calls.
• Receiving and confirming service orders including simple route planning using, for example, Google Maps.

For more information on mobile apps for smartphones from SAP Business ByDesign, see this blog post: https://www.bradler-gmbh.de/sap-business-bydesign-mobil-nutzen/

Cross-departmental

• With SAP Business ByDesign 1811, all users are automatically directed to the HTML5 user interface when they access the system URL.
• With SAP Business ByDesign 1811, most of the help and learning content has been relocated to a more modern platform that enables better visualization of the content and improves readability.
• For each type of business document, you can now specify multiple output channels (e.g. e-mail, print and XML) and define conditions as to how these should be used.
• In the business partner master data, you can now define several e-mail addresses as recipients, including cc / bcc attributes.
• In addition, several print queues with specific form templates can be defined here. All of these settings can be specified for each business document type.
• Previously, when a new test system was requested, the existing test system had to be dismantled immediately. You can now use two test systems in parallel for up to three weeks.

Localization

• The US and German tax return forms for the monthly and annual sales tax returns have been revised in accordance with the legal form changes published by the tax authorities.
• From the next financial year, all changes to the form of these tax return forms can be made by the customer. The following blog post explains how this can be achieved: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/10/02/legal-tax-return-form-changes-in-sap-business-bydesign/

This post is based on Kristof Schneider’s English blog post on the official SAP blog, available at https://blogs.sap.com/2018/10/22/business-bydesign-release-highlights-1811/

All statements without guarantee.