The ten moves every CIO, CFO, and Chief Procurement Officer should make before signing into SAP Digital Access or responding to an indirect use audit. Strategy, tactics, document math, and clause language in one paper.
Indirect access is the single most expensive surprise in the SAP customer base. For more than a decade the issue lived as a contractual ambiguity. SAP's standard license model charged for named users, but the contract also defined any access to SAP data, direct or indirect, as a licensable event. When third party applications, e commerce front ends, robotic process automation tools, or middleware integrations read or wrote to the SAP database, the user populations of those external systems were technically consuming SAP licenses. The Diageo ruling in the United Kingdom in 2017 confirmed the principle in court, with a settlement valuation that ran into tens of millions of pounds. The shock wave moved through every SAP customer base.
SAP responded in 2018 with the Digital Access pricing model, an attempt to convert the named user ambiguity into a document based pricing structure. Nine document categories were defined (sales documents, invoice documents, purchase documents, service and maintenance documents, manufacturing documents, quality management documents, time management documents, material movement documents, and financial documents). Each indirect creation of any of these documents would be priced per document at tiered list rates. The Digital Access Adoption Program (DAAP) provided a conversion credit of up to 90 percent for customers who migrated from the legacy indirect access exposure to the new model. The framework looked clean. The implementation has not been. This paper is the executive briefing we hand to clients facing an indirect use audit, a Digital Access conversion decision, or the integration of a new third party application that touches SAP data.
We wrote it in May 2026, with the indirect access landscape continuing to evolve as customers transition to S/4HANA and RISE. The Digital Access model applies within RISE the same way it applies to on premises ECC, though the negotiation dynamics shift. The recommendations are current. If you want the deeper procedural SAP Indirect Access Audit Defense playbook that pairs with this paper, the companion piece covers the audit response timeline. If you want the live advisory engagement that wraps both, the SAP buyer side advisory page describes the scope.
The paper opens with a one page executive brief, walks through each of the ten recommendations with strategy plus tactics, and closes with the contract clause appendix, the discount benchmark tables, and a self assessment diagnostic.
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Talk to a buyer side advisor →Inside twelve months of a SAP renewal and need to talk to a human first?
Schedule a SAP Advisory Call →The biggest levers are the measured document baseline, the conversion credit, and the scope of the count. Get those three right and the rate barely matters.
Most buyers argue the price per document. The structural items, what counts and over what period, move far more money.
The baseline sets the volume you pay for across the term. A baseline built from measured creation, not the SAP estimate, is the single largest saving available.
Sequence matters. Settle what counts and over what period before you discuss price, because a rate on the wrong baseline saves nothing.
The high impact digital access levers
| Lever | Buyer risk | Buyer move |
|---|---|---|
| Document baseline | Set on SAP estimate | Measure real creation by type |
| Measurement period | Historic years swept in | Define a clean recent period |
| Conversion credit | Existing licenses ignored | Claim the credit you hold |
Measure the documents your integrations actually create, by type and by source system, over a defined period. That evidenced count is the number you negotiate from.
Value the licenses you already own and apply them against the digital access fee. The credit is often the difference between an affordable move and a punitive one.
The standard advice is to take the digital access offer quickly to resolve indirect exposure before an audit hardens. We disagree.
In the deals Fredrik ran, rushing the offer locked in counts that were inflated and double counted, and it waived conversion credit the customer already owned. The buyer side move is to measure real creation, strip the duplicates, and weigh the document model against keeping named user licensing where it costs less.
The buyer side move is to treat the document count as evidence you control, not a figure SAP hands you under a deadline.
Digital access is priced on documents, so the count you measure is the deal, not the rate you are quoted.
Read the counting rules on the SAP digital access page and confirm how indirect use maps to your contract on the SAP software use rights page before you accept a document estimate.
Measure and map first, then respond. The evidence sets the count.
Bring help in as soon as an indirect access claim or a digital access proposal lands. That is where the count and the credit are decided together.
Fredrik Filipsson benchmarked these SAP negotiations himself. He will walk your baseline and your three biggest levers in a 30 minute call. No pitch.
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