SAP integrations

What connects to SAP

SAP covers very different products. S/4HANA is the ERP of record for larger companies and Business One serves smaller ones. SAP Concur, SAP Ariba and SAP SuccessFactors handle expenses, procurement and HR, sometimes next to a non-SAP ERP.

S/4HANA gets connected to sales and purchasing: CRM deals become sales orders, as in SAP S/4HANA and HubSpot, and procurement suites post purchase orders, receipts and invoices, as in Coupa and SAP S/4HANA. Business One typically sits behind a web shop that feeds it orders and reads back stock, see Shopify and SAP Business One. Concur and SuccessFactors run the other way: approved expenses become bookings in accounting, and SuccessFactors exchanges hires and worker changes with recruiting tools and a global HCM such as Workday.

Where SAP integrations break

• Org structure has no equivalent elsewhere. Sales organisation, distribution channel, division and company code decide how SAP processes a document. CRMs, shops and project tools know none of them, so the pipeline has to derive them deterministically.
• Master data has to exist first. A sales order needs a valid business partner and materials, a purchase order a vendor with the right company-code assignment. Missing or inactive values are rejected, so master data moves as a delta driven by SAP changes, not a nightly reload.
• Tax codes, not tax rates. Other systems carry a rate; SAP posts against a tax code that also encodes domestic, EU reverse charge and export treatment. The two are mapped, never copied.
• Numbers are not what they look like. Material and vendor numbers carry leading zeros, units of measure are internal codes rather than ISO units, and currencies have their own decimal handling. A wrong unit does not throw an error, it changes the quantity.
• One bad line rejects the document. S/4HANA rejects a whole purchase order for one invalid account assignment, so every line is validated before submit.