Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors fr...
Norman Ralph Augustine -
Trigger & Background
Ironic as it is, the quote above does carry some truth. For every larger and/or publicly listed company, an annual audit is mandatory. This audit is required to validate correctness of the annual financial statements, but these days also covers the IT systems used to prepare the financial statement.
SAP’s S/4HANA solution – and its predecessors ECC and R/3 – is used by many companies, and therefore specific guidelines to audit those systems have evolved in the past. However, audit activities conducted in SAP’s R/3 / ECC system do often not apply to the S/4HANA Cloud as customers and auditors only have restricted access. More generally speaking, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, represents a “Software as a service” solution and therefore works significantly different than the previous ECC / R/3 system.
As SAP has announced that they will end support and maintenance for SAP ERP ECC / R/3-systems from 2027 onwards, many companies are currently in the process of migrating to SAP S/4HANA. As this includes instances of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, we decided to create this series of blog post, which details the differences in auditing an SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, system versus an SAP S/4HANA system on premise.
The project
In order to identify the differences in auditing SAP S/4HANA on premise versus SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, Deloitte and SAP conducted a “dry run” audit of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and compared it with an existing on-premise system audit. The findings we generated from this project were summarized and presented to our development organization. More importantly, however, these findings are the basis of this blog series.
Objective
The objective of this blog post series is to explain changes in the IT audit procedures as part of the annual year-end audit in the SAP S/4HANA[1] environment in a comprehensible and concise manner. For this purpose, new features, functions an...
Who we are
This project was conducted by:
