Logging on and the Easy Access menu

Fiori is SAP’s strategic user interface, but walk around any company running S/4HANA on-premise or in Private Edition and you will see the classic SAP GUI on many screens. Key users in finance, warehouse and production often spend most of their day in it. Contoso Motor Co. runs SAP S/4HANA 2025 in Private Edition, so its people use both. This course teaches the classic side.

SAP Logon

SAP GUI for Windows is installed on your computer. You start it from a program called SAP Logon (sometimes called the logon pad), which lists the SAP systems your company has set up for you. A typical list shows several entries for the same landscape, such as development, quality and production. Pick the right one carefully: testing in production by mistake is a serious incident.

Double-click a system and the logon screen opens. It asks for four things:

The client is the field that surprises newcomers. One SAP system can hold several clients, each with its own business data and user master records. A sales order created in client 100 does not exist in client 200 of the same system. Course sap-fnd-105 explains clients in more depth; for now, always record the system and client you tested in.

The SAP Easy Access screen

After logging on, you land on SAP Easy Access. Its main parts are:

• Menu bar at the top, with menus such as Menu, Edit, Favorites, Extras, System and Help.
• Standard toolbar, with the command field where you type transaction codes, plus Enter, Save, Back, Exit and Cancel buttons.
• Application toolbar, with buttons specific to the current screen.
• Menu tree, with a Favorites folder and either the SAP menu or your user menu, organized by business area.
• Status bar at the bottom, where messages appear and where you can display the system, client, user and transaction.

Navigating the menu tree

The SAP menu is organized by business area: Logistics, Accounting, Human Resources and so on, down to individual transactions. To create a sales order you could open Logistics → Sales and Distribution → Sales → Order → Create. That path is slow, but it is a good way to discover which transactions exist around a task. Your company may replace the full SAP menu with a user menu built from your roles, showing only what you can use.

Favorites

Right-click the Favorites folder (or use the Favorites menu) to insert a transaction by code, or drag an entry from the menu tree into Favorites. You can create subfolders, for example "Daily" and "Month-end." Favorites are stored for your user, so they follow you to any computer that logs on to the same system and client.

Confirm where you are

Before every test session, check where you are logged on. At the right end of the status bar you can display system information: the system ID, the client, your user and the current transaction. System → Status shows the same details and more, including the product release. It takes five seconds and prevents the most embarrassing testing mistake of all: posting test documents in the wrong system or client. Some companies also color-code their systems with different visual themes, so production looks noticeably different from quality.