We are pleased to announce the integration of SAP Central Finance and SAP Green Ledger, enabling organizations to leverage sustainability reporting capabilities based on their Central Finance system.

With the release of S/4HANA 2025 FPS01, your Central Finance system can serve as the central hub for providing the necessary financial data for SAP Green Ledger, meaning that it is no longer necessary to connect multiple ERP source systems to SAP Green Ledger and eliminating the efforts involved in separate data consolidation for Green Ledger reporting.

The Central Finance system provides all the data that is needed to enable SAP Green Ledger functionalities such as:

• Tracking greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain.
• Monitoring energy consumption and waste generation.
• Analyzing the environmental impact of products and services.
• Supporting compliance with various environmental regulations and standards.

 Because SAP Central Finance (CFIN) is always run on an SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition system, the SAP Green Ledger Integration works in the same way as the standard integration with SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, with some minor differences, which we will outline in this blog.

  

SAP Green Ledger System Landscape 🏡

 

 

As you can see from the architecture above, the mandatory integration deals with the data flows from Central Finance to SAP Green Ledger. These contain master data as well as transactional data.

If you would like to know how to set-up the technical integration between Central Finance (which is always run on an SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition system) and SAP Green Ledger, you can find the details here:  https://help.sap.com/docs/green-ledger/integration/s4hana

 

Further solutions can be used in the landscape optionally/on top, for example

• SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud: These products allow the consumption of extended reporting with many capabilities (SAP Green Ledger Analytical Dashboard).
• SAP Sustainability Footprint Management: You can calculate carbon emissions in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and import these emissions directly from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management into SAP Green Ledger.
• SAP Group Reporting: You can map SAP Green Ledger data to the SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting table ACDOCU and import greenhouse gas emissions data into SAP Group Reporting for consolidated reporting.

 

Details on Master Data Integration 👨‍

 

The screenshot above shows an overview of the master data objects that are needed in SAP Green Ledger.

The following objects are usually already set-up/mapped in CFIN to run Finance processes:

• Company codes
• Chart of accounts
• Ledgers
• Accounts
• Cost centers
• Profit centers
• Projects/WBS (optional)
• Segments (optional)
• Fiscal year variants
• Suppliers
• Companies (optional)

 

Companies

It is sufficient to upload company codes from CFIN to Green Ledger. But if you have already set up companies in CFIN, then these can also be transferred and can be used for Sustainability Reporting on company level. Companies are set up when you use Group Reporting on CFIN, for example.

 

You need to ensure that the following objects are also available in CFIN, although they are more closely related to logistics processes:

• Plants
• Material
• Unit of measure
• Unit of measure dimensions

 

Please note that a product in SAP Green Ledger is referred to as a material in SAP S/4HANA.

If plants and materials have already been replicated from the source systems to the CFIN system (for example, if you are using product costing), then there is no action to be taken. If the objects are not available, you need to treat them as replication objects, for example, using SAP MDG (Master Data Governance) or your own master data replication tools.

For units of measure and units of measure dimensions there are standard codes pre-delivered on the SAP S/4HANA system.

 

The following objects are new objects in SAP S/4HANA and are also required for Green Ledger:

Semantic tags are used in reports or KPIs defined by SAP. The tags are pre-delivered on SAP S/4HANA. You use semantic tags in the financial statement versions by assigning hierarchy nodes from financial statement versions to semantic tags. This enables the system to calculate values for the semantic tags. The same sorting and structuring by semantic tags is also possible in Green Ledger Reporting.

 

 

Details on Transactional Data Integration 💱

There are various business processes that cause carbon emissions. One example is material movements in the procurement process, such as goods receipt from supplier.

In a Central Finance scenario, material movements are posted in the source systems. The postings are replicated to the Central Finance system and posted in CFIN as Universal Journal Entries.

Green Ledger needs these postings to calculate carbon emissions. The data is posted in Green Ledger as carbon collections.

The two apps above can be used to manage your carbon collections.

In the app “Manage Carbon Data Import” you trigger the import of transactional data from the Central Finance system. For material movements you need to specify certain selection criteria to start the import:

 You also need to upload a valuation file. This is a file which enables data mapping in Green Ledger. In this file, you can specify for each company code which values should be mapped during the import. One example is the GHG category, which is mapped into the emission scope in Green Ledger. There is a template file available, which you can download directly from the app (see screenshot below).

Click “Download Template” to access the template, as shown below:

Then you maintain your values in the file, upload it again and then carry out the import activities.  

 

In the app “Manage Carbon Collections” you can display and edit carbon collections. You can also create carbon collections manually in this app.

 

If you drill down into a carbon collection, you can find the journal entries related to this carbon collection posted in Green Ledger. The carbon emissions are posted with different scopes:

• Scope 1: Direct emissions
• Scope 2: Purchased Energy
• Scope 3: Indirect value chain emissions

The material movements belong to indirect value chain emissions.

 

 

 As soon as the carbon collections are posted in SAP Green Ledger, you can continue with activities in Green Ledger such as

• Manage journal entries
• Manage allocations
• Display account balances in tons of emissions
• Display line items with emission data
• Monitor GHG emissions on the Carbon Data Dashboard

 

Green Ledger Process Flow ⏳

Once you have completed the set-up, the full Green Ledger Workflow is supported:

For the complete documentation, see Green Ledger Overview: https://help.sap.com/docs/green-ledger/use/overview

  

Special Considerations for Central Finance 🤔

As already mentioned above, you can connect an SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition system to SAP Green Ledger and you can connect a Central Finance system to SAP Green Ledger. There are no technical differences, but there could be slight differences in the processes and certain points to be taken into account.

Opening Balances

When you go live with Green Ledger for an SAP S/4HANA system, you need to create opening balances for the carbon collections. This is done by manually uploading carbon data via CSV file upload in Green Ledger. After that you can start the import of data from your connected SAP S/4HANA systems.

The same handling is needed for integration to Central Finance. You might ask yourself why the Central Finance initial load cannot be used as a starting point. The reason is that the Central Finance balance load does not take quantities into account. Therefore it cannot transfer the necessary data to calculate the emissions. That means that you need to manually upload balances as usual for an SAP S/4HANA system.

 

Material Ledger

Material Ledger cannot be actively used on a Central Finance system. But this is not an issue. The activation of Material Ledger is not a prerequisite for integration with SAP Green Ledger. The value flows and quantity flows from the source systems to Central Finance contain the data needed in SAP Green Ledger.

 

Material Movements

For every material movement in SAP S/4HANA, there is one Journal Entry posted with carbon emissions in SAP Green Ledger. Material Movements currently cover purchase order, production order and stock transfer related material movements.

In SAP Green Ledger, the Journal Entries with carbon emissions are posted per plant and per product (material). If you need to have the full granularity of emissions per material, you should take this into account when you map materials for Central Finance. In this case an N:1 mapping won’t give you full granularity.

 

Extended Value with SAP Group Reporting 📙

As we already mentioned, SAP Green Ledger and SAP Group Reporting also work together. You can map the data from Green Ledger to the ACDOCU table of SAP Group Reporting and then upload the greenhouse gas emission data to ACDOCU. This enables:

• Consolidated Reporting and Analysis: Combined reporting of financial and environmental information
• Enhanced Compliance and Transparency: Meet Regulatory Requirements like IFRS S2
• Strategic Decision-Making: Identify potential environmental risks and opportunities and track your progress towards sustainability targets 

Please see the details in the Blog: Streamlining Sustainability Reporting: Integrating SAP Green Ledger with SAP Group Reporting

And here comes the extended value:

You don’t have to use a separate instance for SAP Group Reporting, but you can implement SAP Group Reporting on top of your Central Finance system. This means you can also leverage all the benefits of consolidation from your Central Finance system.

 

Ending with an Outlook 👀

There are many innovative topics on the roadmap for SAP Green Ledger.

https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=73554900100800005432

You can be sure that SAP Central Finance will continue to validate the latest innovations and to enable integration, ensuring that sustainable processes are supported.