If you’ve ever felt that SAP reporting lives “somewhere else”—in spreadsheets, data lakes, or BW—you’re not alone. Many teams still export data because traditional reports can feel fragmented or too technical. Embedded Analytics in SAP S/4HANA changes that by putting trustworthy, drillable insights right where you work. And with the new Review Booklets, the experience becomes faster, more guided, and easier to adopt across finance and controlling.
This blog is based on a presentation by Sebastian Doll at the SAP Controlling Conference. Sebastian is the Head of Product Management for Management Accounting and Revenue Recognition at SAP Cloud ERP.
One Journal, Many Views—Without Reconciliation
SAP S/4HANA records the full quantity and value flow of business transactions in the Universal Journal—combining G/L, Asset Accounting, Controlling, Profit Center, and Margin Analysis data. On top sit CDS views (the virtual data model) and Analytical Queries, which power Fiori apps for KPIs, line-item detail, multidimensional pivots, and analytical list pages. The result: a single source of truth you can slice by any relevant dimension—customer, product, profit center—without reconciliation gymnastics.
The Analytics “Stack” in Practice
For business users, Embedded Analytics shows up as:
- Overview Pages & Insight Cards to monitor KPIs (with color cues when something needs attention).
- Analytical List Pages to move seamlessly from trends to journal-entry detail.
- Multidimensional Reports for pivot-style analysis.
- Analysis for Office for those who love an Excel front end.
- Embedded SAC dashboards (launchable from Fiori; SAC license required).
A hallmark of the UX is intent-based navigation—click to drill from a KPI to the list page to the T-account of a specific journal entry. Predictive Accounting entries (e.g., incoming sales orders) are marked and stored in an extension ledger, letting you view actuals plus predictive signals side by side.
Personas: Who Does What
- Business users consume and act on insights.
- Key users (analytics specialists) tailor what’s delivered—adding fields, defining KPIs, and assembling reports via Manage KPIs and Reports, Custom Fields & Logic, View Browser, and data-source extensions.
- Developers build or extend CDS views when deeper modeling is needed.
A powerful technique here is semantic texts tied to your Financial Statement Version or global hierarchies. Instead of dumping dozens of accounts, you expose meaningful KPIs like Billed Revenue, Recognized Revenue, or Actual Cost directly in the analytical query.
Review Booklets: Guided, Real-Time, and Collaborative
Review Booklets package multiple related analyses into a single, guided Fiori experience—grouped pages, consistent filters, and ready-to-use row/column sets. Already available with several scenarios in public cloud, the first wave arrives for S/4HANA 2025 on-prem (with more to follow). Why they matter:
- Speed to insight: Preconfigured pages reduce report hunting and context switching.
- Real-time drilldowns: Stay in S/4HANA and preserve the audit trail down to journal entries.
- Collaboration: Add cell-level comments, tag colleagues, and trigger notifications that deep-link back to the exact spot in the booklet. Share views via email or Microsoft Teams.
- Excel-style power, in-system: Apply conditional formatting (e.g., threshold colors for contribution margin per unit) without exporting data.
- Security & TCO: Keep data where it belongs; authorizations and costs remain simpler than spawning external stacks.
For power users, the Review Booklet Designer (S/4HANA 2025 and up) lets you copy and tailor SAP-delivered booklets, add V3 analytical queries as data providers, adjust pages, and curate page groups to fit your business.
Licensing & Compatibility Notes
Most Embedded Analytics capabilities come with your S/4HANA license (public cloud, private cloud, or on-prem). Embedded SAC requires an SAC license. Advanced AI features branded as Financial Business Insights within Review Booklets are part of a premium AI add-on. If your reporting needs outgrow in-system analytics, SAP Business Data Cloud (with Datasphere under the hood) provides governed data products and large-scale analytics—still leveraging SAP semantics.
Getting Started Fast
- Find content: Use Fiori Apps Library to find delivered analytics by Release and Line of Business.
- Explore data: In View Browser, locate the CDS cubes/queries behind your processes.
- Tailor KPIs: Use Manage KPIs and Reports and semantic texts to surface business-ready measures.
- Pilot a booklet: Start with cost center or financial statement review booklets; add filters, comments, and conditional formatting.
- Scale adoption: Save filter variants, pin key KPIs to the Launchpad, and train key users to iterate.
Embedded Analytics—and especially Review Booklets—brings the “insight-to-action” loop into the flow of work. Less exporting, fewer emails, more decisions—made faster, with confidence, inside S/4HANA.
This blog is based on the presentation by Sebastian Doll: “Unlocking the Power of Embedded Analytics with Review Booklets” from the SAP Controlling Conference. To watch the full session and explore other SAP Controlling topics, sign up for our membership here.
