Self-serve consumer-side access to archived S/4HANA data — ACDOCA, BKPF/BSEG, LFA1/KNA1, MARA — for finance ops, treasury, internal audit, tax filing, and tax-authority response. SQL/REST/BI-tool access, role-based security, GDPR-compliant masking, GoBD audit export.
Different consumers want different things. The archive has to serve all of them without becoming a least-common-denominator product.
Finance ops wants Excel — a familiar spreadsheet sourced from the archive via ODBC, where the trial-balance lookup that used to take 3 clicks in Fiori now takes 3 clicks in Excel. Treasury wants the historical bank-statement detail (FEBKO/FEBEP) joined with payment runs (PAYR) for cash-forecasting baseline. Internal audit wants direct SQL access for SOX 404 sampling against journal entries (ACDOCA), procurement (EKKO/EKPO), and revenue (VBAK/VBRK). Tax wants annual extracts in the right format for corporate tax filing, VAT returns, transfer-pricing analysis. Tax authorities want immutable, hash-signed, GoBD-compliant exports they can load into IDEA or equivalent audit tools.
Each of these populations has a different access pattern, a different tooling preference, a different security profile, and a different urgency. A legacy data access layer that satisfies only one of them is a failure — the other four populations either keep S/4HANA alive 'for their queries' (defeating the decommissioning business case) or generate friction with IT for ad-hoc data pulls.
Syntra ETL's S/4HANA legacy data access layer is built around this multi-consumer reality. SQL/JDBC/ODBC for analyst-led work, REST API for programmatic and integration use cases, BI-tool connectors for dashboard rebuild, pre-built exports for tax-authority response, role-based security with sensitive-field masking, full audit log on every read. One archive, one source of truth, five populations served.
Every consumer population gets the interface that matches its workflow — without compromising on security, audit, or compliance.
Direct ODBC connectivity into Excel and Smart View. Saved-query packs for trial balance, AP aging, vendor history. Finance ops keeps the spreadsheet workflow; archive replaces S/4HANA as the data source invisibly.
JDBC/ODBC connectivity. Pre-built data models for FI, MM, SD, EAM. Replaces SAP Analytics Cloud / Fiori embedded analytics / BW Query / Lumira.
DBeaver, Toad, DataGrip, SQL Developer connectivity for internal audit and analyst-led work. Standard SQL, full ANSI SQL support, partition pruning for performance.
Programmatic access for downstream applications, custom dashboards, integration with audit-management tools (TeamMate, AuditBoard), and regulator-response automation.
Pre-built export to IDEA-compatible (German Finanzamt under GoBD), HMRC formats, IRS Audit File, US state-level audit-file formats. Hash-signed for immutability proof.
For data-engineering teams using Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or Spark. Read Parquet directly from archive object storage with partition pruning.
Whether legacy data access is your first use case (kept-alive S/4HANA being unwound) or your last (post-decommission archive going into production use), the rollout pattern is similar.
Interview each consumer population: finance ops, treasury, internal audit, external audit liaison, tax team. Document use cases, query patterns, tooling preferences, urgency requirements, sensitive-data exposure constraints.
Map consumer populations to role profiles. Define which fields are masked by default per role, which require explicit unmask, audit-log retention for unmask events. GDPR Article 25 alignment confirmed.
Standard reports deployed: trial balance per BUKRS, AP aging by vendor, AR aging by customer, journal-entry detail with full account assignment, asset register per ANLA book, material valuation as-of date.
Excel/Smart View ODBC, Tableau/Power BI JDBC, REST API endpoints, direct Parquet access from data warehouses configured. Tax-authority export formats validated against sample tax-authority requests.
Each consumer population runs realistic queries through their preferred tool against the archive. Side-by-side validation against live S/4HANA (if still available) confirms parity. Sign-off pack issued per consumer population.
Archive becomes the system of record for historical queries. S/4HANA can move to read-only or decommissioned. New consumer populations onboarded via the same pattern as needs evolve.
Generic archive products treat data as opaque files. Syntra ETL treats SAP S/4HANA data as a structured, queryable, audit-defensible asset.
Archive preserves the exact SAP schema — column names, datatypes, key relationships. Auditors querying ACDOCA in the archive get the same fields as in live S/4HANA, just faster.
Parquet columnar storage, fiscal-year/period/BUKRS partitioning, column pruning, partition pruning. Multi-billion-row queries return in seconds, not hours.
GoBD-compliant Finanzamt export. HMRC audit-file format. IRS US state-level audit files. FDA-ready batch records for pharma. BaFin-compatible record exports for German banking.
PII (PA0001/PA0002), salary (PA0008), bank accounts (LFBK/KNBK), tax IDs masked by default. Role-controlled unmask with mandatory audit log. GDPR Article 25 compliant.
Every Parquet shard is hash-signed at extraction. WORM-lock optional. Auditors and tax authorities get cryptographic proof the data wasn't modified after archive.
Hybrid scenarios where some SAP modules stay live: archive query layer can join archived FI data with live SAP MM via OData, presenting a unified historical view.
SAP S/4HANA legacy data access is the consumer-facing capability that lets finance ops, treasury, internal audit, tax, and external regulators query historical S/4HANA data after the source S/4HANA instance has been decommissioned or moved to read-only. The Syntra ETL archive holds the complete historical dataset — every ACDOCA universal journal entry, every BKPF/BSEG row, every LFA1/KNA1 master record, every MARA/MARC item — in queryable Parquet, partitioned for analytical access. Access is provided via SQL (JDBC/ODBC), REST API, BI-tool integrations (Tableau, Power BI, OTBI), and pre-built GoBD-compliant export packs for tax-authority audits.
Five distinct user populations, each with different access patterns. Finance ops: monthly close support, prior-period comparison, vendor/customer history lookups — typically high-frequency, low-volume queries. Treasury: historical bank statement reconciliation, cash forecasting baseline, historical FX position — typically weekly, mid-volume. Internal audit: SOX 404 sampling, journal-entry review, segregation-of-duties testing on closed periods — typically quarterly, high-volume during testing windows. Tax: corporate tax filing support, VAT/sales-tax audit response, transfer-pricing analysis — typically annual, very high volume during filing windows. Tax authorities and regulators (Finanzamt, HMRC, IRS, BaFin, FDA, MHRA): ad-hoc audit and enquiry response — low frequency, very high stakes.
Access is role-based with mandatory audit logging. Every query against the archive is logged with user identity, timestamp, query text, rows returned, and data classification accessed. Archive data is encrypted at rest with KMS-managed keys (with optional customer-managed key support) and in transit with TLS 1.3. Sensitive S/4HANA fields — employee personal data in PA0001/PA0002, salary in PA0008, vendor bank accounts in LFBK, customer bank accounts in KNBK, tax IDs in LFA1/KNA1 — are masked by default and require explicit role permission to unmask. The masking layer satisfies GDPR Article 25 ('data protection by design'). For BaFin-regulated financial services and FDA-regulated pharma, separate role partitioning is supported so regulator-specific queries don't bleed into broader operational access.
Yes. The archive exposes a standard SQL interface via JDBC/ODBC, so any BI tool that connects to a relational data source — Tableau, Power BI, Qlik, Looker, OTBI, Lumira, MicroStrategy — works without modification. Pre-built data models for FI, MM, SD, EAM, and HCM (where present) accelerate dashboard rebuild for users who previously relied on SAP Analytics Cloud, Fiori analytics, embedded reports, or BW. There's also a REST API for programmatic access and direct Parquet access from Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or Spark for data-engineering teams who prefer warehouse-native access. Standard auditor extracts ship as saved queries — GL detail per period, AP voucher detail with vendor, payroll register, asset register.
Sub-second for typical operational queries (a single GL period for a single BUKRS company code, an AP voucher lookup, a vendor history for a single supplier, a material valuation as-of date). 5–30 seconds for multi-period aggregations spanning a fiscal year of activity. 1–5 minutes for multi-year, multi-company cross-ledger consolidation queries against billion-row history. Archive data is partitioned by fiscal year, period, company code, and document type, and the query engine uses Parquet's column pruning and partition pruning to minimise scan. For year-end audit support, customers commonly pre-materialise auditor-facing views (trial balance snapshots, AP aging snapshots, asset register snapshots) so audit queries always hit pre-computed results.
Tax authorities don't typically connect directly to private cloud archives — they request data exports in standard formats (IDEA-compatible files for German Finanzamt under GoBD, similar formats for HMRC UK, IRS Audit File for various US jurisdictions). Syntra ETL ships pre-built exporters that produce these formats from archived S/4HANA data: select the period range, select the data domains, the export pack is generated and delivered. The export includes hash signatures and immutability proofs so the tax authority can verify the data wasn't modified post-decommission. Several Syntra customers have completed German Finanzamt audits, UK HMRC enquiries, and US state-level tax audits sourced entirely from the archive with no requirement to revive S/4HANA.
Partially — and intentionally. SAP's authorisation objects (M_BEST_BSA for POs, F_BKPF_BUK for journals, K_CCA for cost-centre accounting) are organisationally complex. Replicating them 1:1 in a downstream archive query layer would defeat the simplification benefit of moving off SAP. Syntra ETL's archive supports configurable role-based access at the data-domain level (FI, CO, MM, SD, EAM, HCM), at the organisational-unit level (BUKRS company code, WERKS plant, VKORG sales org), and at the sensitive-field level (PII, salary, bank account). For organisations that need finer-grained access matching SAP authorisations, custom role configuration is supported. Every access decision is logged for audit.
Some customers move only Finance to Oracle Fusion while keeping SAP shop-floor (PP/QM/MES integration) live, or move only SCM while Finance stays on SAP for local-GAAP reasons. Syntra ETL's archive can selectively cover only the modules that moved — for example, full FI/CO history in the archive while live SAP retains MM/PP/QM. Cross-domain queries (a fixed asset whose accounting moved to Fusion but whose maintenance plan stays in SAP PM) are supported via federation: the archive query layer can join its own FI data with live SAP PM data via OData. As the hybrid model evolves and more SAP modules eventually retire, additional domains are archived without disrupting prior access.
30-minute call. We'll walk through your finance ops, treasury, audit, and tax requirements — and design the legacy data access layer that lets you decommission S/4HANA without disrupting any of them.