SAP Business One Core Modules

Drawing upon 35 years of experience in developing business management software, SAP built SAP Business One from the ground up – exclusively to meet the changing and industry-specific needs of small businesses like yours.

From financials to comprehensive reporting, SAP Business One has everything a small to medium sized business need.

The information below outlines the core functionality provided

Accounting and Financials

Financial accounting – Handle all your financial transactions – including general ledger, journal entries, budgeting, and account setup and maintenance – in one system, with comprehensive tools and reports.

Budgeting – Manage budget creation, allocation, and distribution. Provide budget tracking, reporting, and alerts that notify the responsible users whenever a transaction exceeds a monthly or annual budget limit.

Banking – Track all banking processes such as cash receipts, check writing, deposits, advance payments, credit card payments, and account reconciliation.

Financial reporting – Provide easy-to-use financial reports, including balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow analysis, transaction reports, multi-period comparisons, and budget reports.

 Operations and Distribution

Sales and delivery – Generate price quotes, enter customer orders, set up deliveries, update stock levels, report on customers' current balances, and manage all billing and accounts receivables.

E-commerce – Set up your own "online store" that is fully integrated with inventory and financials, including online catalog, shopping cart, order processing and notification, customer configuration tools, and online customer services.

Purchasing – Manage and maintain your vendor contracts and transactions, including the issue of purchase orders, updates to stock quantities, calculations for the value of imported items, returns and credits, and payment processing.

Inventory management – Handle inventory levels, item management, price lists, special price agreements, transfers between warehouses, and stock transactions – all through integration with other processes like sales and purchasing.

Production planning – Manage your production material requirements through a wizard-based process that enables users to define a planning scenario in five easy steps and predict demand based on forecasts.

Administration and Reporting

Human resources management – Capture pertinent information about each employee so you have one place to maintain and manage your employee records and data.         Automatic alerts – Define your own alerts and unique workflow processes by establishing approvals, procedures, and steps that are to be automatically initiated when a specific event occurs.         Dashboards and reports – Create intuitive reports and dashboards for every aspect of your business, including customers and suppliers, sales, cash flow, bookkeeping, warehouse stock, financial statements, pricing, and customer activities.         Drag and relate – View important relationships between data – and instantly gain a complete understanding of any business transaction – by dragging the data you want more information on, positioning it on top of other data, and then drilling down for more details.         Customization and integration – Enable users to easily add fields, change forms, and personalize queries and reports. A standard software development kit (SDK) consisting of reusable business objects and user interface customization tools is available to customize and integrate SAP Business One to meet your specific industry and business needs.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Sales opportunity management – Manage the entire sales process through different sales stages. Track sales opportunities and activities, analyze their outcome, and forecast revenue potential. You can monitor and analyze sales opportunities using dashboards and sales reports.         Microsoft Outlook integration – Import customer data from SAP Business One into your Outlook contacts list. Activities and tasks entered into your calendar in SAP Business One can be synchronized with your schedule in Microsoft Outlook.         Customer service and support – Allow your customer service and support team to administer customer warranty, service contracts, manage service calls, and track all customer interaction activities.         Business partner management – Manage master data for your resellers and channel partners – including profiles, contact summaries, account balances, and sales pipeline analysis – to track sales leads and opportunities.

 

SAP® Business One Product Coverage

Reporting and Data Navigation Capabilities

General Technologies (Drag&Relate™; Alerts; UI Customization . . .)

Financials Sales Service Purchase Inventory Manufacturing

– Chart of accounts –

Accounts segments –

Journal entry – Journal

voucher – Recurrent

transaction –

Multicurrency exchange

rate – Financial reports –

Budget cost centers –

Sales tax – Multiple

periods – Deposit –

Checks – Credits –

Receipt – Deferred

payment

– Quotation – Order

– Drop ship –

Invoice – Delivery –

Return –

Multicurrency price

lists – Client

management –

Gross profit

calculation –

Contact

management –

Opportunities and

pipeline

management –

Outlook integration

– Service

contract

management –

Service

planning –

Customer

tracking across

interactions –

Knowledge

database –

Service call

management

– Purchase

order –

Purchase

delivery –

Purchase

return –

Purchase

invoice –

Purchase

credit note –

Landed cost

– Items

management

– Item query –

Price list –

Receipt to

stock –

Release from

stock – Stock

transactions –

Warehouse

transfer –

Serial

numbers –

Batches

management

– Pick and

pack – Kitting

– Bill of materials –

Production orders –

Forecasting – MRP

wizard –

Recommendation

report

Software Development Kit

Business Process Knowledge 

Good SAP consultant should always have sound business process knowledge. What is this business process knowledge? The process surrounded at each business activity / item. To make it simpler, when you are working in an organisation, you would see number of jumbling words. For example, credit note, debit note, invoice, bank statement, good received note, inventory control, stock taking, balance sheet, profit and loss account, trail balance, purchase returns, production, planning, forecasting, budget, cash flow statement, cost sheet, funds flow, standard cost, marginal cost, fixed cost, materials, purchases, hedging, negotiable instruments, inter-bank clearing, banking operations, petty cash, procurement, purchase order, purchase requisition and what not. Now the question is how can I improve my business process knowledge? Business processes are dynamic and need not necessarily they are same within the industry. It may change from company to company. You need to understand each such word in detail and understand the business process flow surrounded by it. The important things to know is what is the triggering point for this activity and what are the subsequent business activities that are going to be followed. If you work, on these items, over a period of time, you would get good base of business process knowledge.

Configuration Skills 

Configuration Skills are the most important skills for any SAP Consultant. Unless, you master in this area, you are not going to get the confidence in any project and you will be dependent on other people. You should be master yourself not only just configuring the system, but also needs to understand the impact from end user point of view. There are number of consultants reluctant to put their hands on the key board, however, intended to become master consultants, that is never going to be happened. I have observed number of consultants, they would never take the ownership of doing anything on SAP system, however, sit next to you by just watching and talking. If you are going into that mode, you are never going to be a SAP Consultant. The number of times you are going to configure and follow the business process / end user documents, it would give great confidence. Therefore, try to gather configuration documents and do as much practice as you can. Exploring the options in system gives you enough confidence, as the troubleshooting skills are very required for SAP Consulting profession. 

 

SAP Help 

SAP Help is like a Bible. Every day start reading sap help. http://help.sap.com SAP help is written with utmost care by experts. The more number of times that you are reading it would give enormous conceptual clarity. Whatever be level of your skill and knowledge in SAP, you should never forget reading SAP Help. SAP Consultants who mastered has spent thousands of hours reading this. You need to have many years reading on daily basis and it is not an easy job. Many people find it difficult to read huge amount of text regularly and religiously. At one point when the consultants become good in their own area, they tend to ignore reading this. They would refer only as and when required. However, in my opinion, reading SAP Help is habit that needs to be practiced in case if you need to transform yourself to a great consultant. 

 

SAP Community Network

Over the years, SAP Community Network http://scn.sap.com/ has transformed itself to a rich source of SAP knowledge. SAP should itself feel proud of what a great platform that they have created to bring together the thousands of consultants across the globe. Points etc. has motivated number of people to contribute to the great extent. More than points, it is knowledge that is being shared through forums, articles, blogs, videos etc. are really amazing. Without being part of SAP Community Network, I do not consider you as a SAP Consultant. You may be highly knowledgeable, however, without that being shared for the community, there is really not much value. I do not think you would get any better platform to share your knowledge than this and get recognized. It is always worth to contribute / read the forums on a daily basis. This good habit would keep yourself with good amount of knowledge. Please do not only ask questions, try to share / answer whatever you can. There are number of people only tend to ask questions, but never tend to give answers. This is a very bad practice, life is to share and help. Just asking questions would make you nowhere.

 

 

Service Market Place

There is no better place than Service Market Place https://service.sap.com for SAP Consultants. It is really surprising to know that there are many certified consultants who do not even know where to login and how to login to this great resource. I understand you need to have the logon credentials to access this, if you do not have one, please ask your SAP Basis administrators. If you are already certified, please ask SAP Education / Help Desk, they would give your password. There is not just one type of document. For everything, you would be asked to refer a particular SAP Note, without having access to this, you could never know what the Note says. This is not just for referring notes, when you need to raise OSS (Online SAP Support) notes for your customers. It is not just limited to these things, it has everything. I cannot imagine a SAP consultant without having access to this great place. 

 

SAP Best Practices Building Blocks

Being new to the consultant world, people tend to configure the system and test end user transactions how it works. However, there is no idea where to start and how to integrate between various modules. SAP Best Practices Building blocks would give a great amount of confidence to the consultant, as they provide the detailed configuration documents, business process documents and scenario overviews etc. The following link would be helpful. There are different versions of it. It contains guides across industry / country. If you have problem in accessing the following links, use Internet Explorer (IE) rather than google chrome browser. If you configure various scenarios in your demo system and test as per the business process documents, then your confidence levels will be immensely increased. The number of times you configure various scenarios, you would be mastered in that area. 

 

  

Networking

21st Century has started with Professional Networking / Social Network. You cannot imagine anybody without having linkedin / twitter / facebook. You always need to maintain the network and develop them over a period. Being knowledgeable is half of your task, whereas maintaining professional network is the other half. Both are like two sides of the same coin. Linkedin the best professional network site, everybody should have one and keep your profile up to date. You profile is the snapshot of your skills, education and achievements etc. If you give a name of a person, people tend to search in linkedin. If you do not have linkedin account, then they would think either you are fake or you do not exist. It is really awful to work in a professional organisation and do not have an up to date linkedin account. Personally, if I cannot see a person in linkedin, I surely believe, that person is a fake. Therefore, please update your linkedin profile, have good professional network and try to get recommendations from others.

Sharing Knowledge

There are number of people who are very reluctant to share their knowledge. You will only be recognized when you share your knowledge with your clients, colleagues and the community around you. If you do not share your knowledge, the knowledge inside you will be rusted over a period of time. Therefore, always open to learn to new things at the same go for an extra mile to share the knowledge with others. I have been negatively criticized by some of my friends / colleagues for writing blogs. When the whole world is writing blogs, why cannot we? I may not be expert in writing blogs, if anybody is being motivated with my blog, the very purpose of my task is accomplished. It is not required to have great amount of knowledge to share, but you should have wonderful heart. If you just work for yourself, earn yourself and educate yourself, then you would never get an identity in the world. Remove every barrier around you and start using your fullest potential to share the knowledge. 

Communication Skills 

Last, but not the least is Communication Skills. 90% of success to your career is dependent on your communications. Do not underestimate the power of communication skills in your career. It is not that everybody would have great amount of communication skills. It all depends on the natural skills, environment you grown up, the education you have undertaken etc. If you think you do not have them, then try to develop over a period of time. Communication Skills are not just talking in English, being a SAP Consultant you should always learn to talk both in Business Language and Technical Language. When you go to client places, it is always expected to talk to them in business language. At the same you should also have good command on the technical abilities when you are conveying to the other consultants. Nobody is perfect in this world, keep pushing yourself to fill the gaps in this area.