How to Become an SAP Accounts Payable Specialist

Are you looking to start a career in corporate finance work? Have you heard about the challenging, rewarding, and lucrative potential that systems applications and products (SAP) presents for those working in accounts payable?

You’re not alone. In fact, many financial experts who work in the accounts payable space are pursuing SAP Training for the career value (and the bigger paycheck) that comes from a specialized certification.

So what do you have to do to start or grow your career as an AP specialist? In this blog, you’ll find five solid steps you can take to become an SAP accounts payable specialist.

1. Start with SAP Fundamentals

Before you get started with all of the specialized intricacies that SAP has to offer, it’s crucial to understand SAP fundamentals. This includes essential knowledge like navigation, application-specific skills, reporting, financial accounting overviews, and more.

It may sound overly-simple to start your SAP accounts payable training this way, but the truth is that these fundamentals set the stage for your success in every subsequent step. This is because these fundamental skills are not just “introductory” — they’re also foundational. That means you’ll be building on these skills as you progress.

Without these core skills, you’ll have a much harder time learning and using SAP. When you learn them first, you prime yourself for success.

2. Understand SAP Accounting & Reporting

As an SAP accounts payable specialist, accounting and reporting will become common tasks in your day-to-day work. Your role at a company will be to track financial figures and, when necessary, show them in an easy-to-understand format to other departments, your own manager, or even your company’s leadership team.

Some reporting options in this methodology include reports on A/P information systems, vendor balances, and vendor lists. It’s also important that you understand how to work with these lists and balance expenditures.

Generally speaking, the skills that allow you to do this are fundamental to your training and as a future specialist — just like the skills in the previous step — but they’re much more specific to your day-to-day role than, say, menu navigation.

Overall, these introductory skills will give you a firm understanding of how to perform basic expectations in your role while setting your stage for growth.

3. Understand SAP Fiori

Fiori (sometimes spelled FIORI) is a new term that SAP uses to describe a set of frequently-used functions that have always existed within the software. In summary, Fiori is an ultra-streamlined, multi-platform set of applications from SAP that allow you to create information lookups, self-service tasks, workflow details, and more.

Fiori is also used with many different tasks associated with accounts payable, including its analytical branch in SAP. You’ll learn how to perform tasks like creating invoices, navigating supplier reports, and processing purchase orders, among others.

Beyond that, you’ll also grow with Fiori as a skill set so that you can incorporate your knowledge into analytics software. Fiori accounts payable analytics empowers you to run reports that monitor the overall “health” of your accounts payable process on the company and individual levels.

Working with SAP Fiori analytics also means using and understanding some of the other advanced business apps that may also be able to play a role in your journey to an SAP accounts payable specialist.

4. Earn Your SAP Accounts Payable Certification

Finally, it’s time to earn your certification as an SAP accounts payable specialist. This includes a final certification process that may include any number of practical proof-of-knowledge tasks or questions based on simple information recall.

Generally speaking, you can expect this final certification step to challenge your knowledge, and it’s recommended that you prepare for the process before you start it. Certification exams tend to be time-consuming and they may be stressful for individuals on a personal level, so it’s always best to prepare in the way that works best for you.

Once you've earned your certification you’ve not only advanced your skills and improved your employability — you’ve become a major player in a company’s plan for long-term success.

Still, when it comes to SAP, it’s not just enough to earn a certification to make a certain career move. There’s always another step to take!

5. Continue Your Education

SAP is a pivotal part of many companies’ infrastructure. It’s enormously versatile, and it offers hundreds of different opportunities to motivated individuals such as you.

But SAP — and its developers — understand that times change. The streamlined Fiori system is a perfect example. They know it’s hard to update systems as large as SAP, but they do it anyway because they understand that it’s essential to keep any company up-to-date with everything from IT to accounts payable.

That’s why you’ll have plenty of opportunities to broaden your professional horizons with SAP. Continuing your education may mean continuing to learn vertically, like looking into more opportunities related to finance. It may also mean continuing to learn horizontally or taking on a completely new subject in SAP in which you can become an expert.

Start Your SAP Accounts Payable Certification Today!

Are you ready to take the plunge and start toward your SAP accounts payable certification? We have the exact place where you can start by walking through these steps, one by one. Click here to discover our SAP accounts payable learning path! Or get unlimited access to our entire library with an SAP Training Subscription.