Discover SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting

January 24, 2022

Financial closing can be a stressful task. Organizations often use numerous different tools for their accounting, which results in non-value-added reconciliation processes and leaves substantial room for error. When head office requires financial insights, they are held back by manual adjustments, data silos, and different reporting standards. SAP S/4HANA® Finance for group reporting leverages the simplified data model of SAP S/4HANA to offer an high level of transparency and speed in group consolidation.

Group-level financial consolidation is a critical task that comes with a high level of complexity and risk. With numerous different business entities, ERP systems, accounting regulations, currencies, and people involved, consolidation can be a challenge. Many organizations are working in a world of data silos, which cause inefficiency, lost time, and frustration. For example, isolated systems often lead to incomplete accounting records, lengthyreconciliation processes, and even multiple versions of the truth.

Conventional approaches to consolidation are too heavily reliant on spreadsheets or data warehouses and involve many time-intensive manual processes. When it comes to crunch time and you need to close your books at the end of the month, these outdated methods can lead to serious issues.

Unified consolidation offers an effective solution to these challenges. This new approach combines local close and group close, resulting in substantial gains in speed, accuracy, and group wide transparency. Direct access to the financial data of group entities eliminates the need for multiple, separate closing tools. Local close data and relevant adjustments are immediately reflected in group reporting results without having to be manually transferred. As a result, the closing process is greatly accelerated, freeing up accounting and finance teams for more value-added activities and enabling them to become trusted advisors in the organization.

Unified Group Reporting and Quick Data Insight

SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting is SAP’s answer to the changing world of financial consolidation. With our new solution, you have greater transparency and auditability as you can drill down from group reporting into the line items of individual entities. This provides you witha detai led view of local accounting to support analysis and decision-making. For external reporting, the solution supports data lineage and auditability as you can drill down from group reporting to line items.
.
The solution automates key processes such as currency translation, consolidation calculations, and cash flow reporting. As consolidations run on real-time transactional data, your accounting and finance teams have more time to help steer the business and make better decisions in less time. In addition, total cost of ownership is reduced due to the simplified technology.
.
Thanks to the single universal journal in SAP S/4HANA Finance, you have a single source of truth for financial and management accounting data. This eliminates the effort of manually transferring data to a central group reporting system and reduces the risk of errors.
.
By removing data replications and redundancies, the system considerably simplifies processes. It also eliminates the need for reconciliation between your ERP and consolidation systems.

.
SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting enables you to:

Combine your financial and management accounting data and transactional detail into a single source of truth.
Use a single, unified data model to simplify processes, increase productivity, and reduce risk.
Unify entity and group close and reduce maintenance of multiple versions of master data.
Close the books quickly with high confidence in the accuracy and completeness of results.
Analyze financial data on the fly at different levels of granularity.

A Global Platform from Data Collection to Reporting

To create a unified platform for integrated group reporting, SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting can be connected to other cloud or on-premise solutions. Together with SAP® Analytics Cloud and SAP Group Reporting Data Collection, the solution streamlines consolidation and financial reporting on a group level. Moreover, the native SAP Fiori® user experience facilitates collaboration and provides greater transparency on items requiring attention.
.
SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The cloud version receives automatic, quarterly software updates, so you always have access to the latest innovations in areas such as machine learning and predictive analytics. For larger, more complex legacy landscapes, SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation offers an additional reduced risk adoption scenario..