Financial close is an essential process for any business and in the pursuit of digital ambitions and simplifying applications effectiveness, companies are considering revamp capabilities for the financial close process.
As you look to modernize your application portfolio for financial consolidation and management reporting, SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting needs to be on your radar. This is SAP’s product strategy for the future and will be the focus area for innovations.
SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting is an integrated platform to simplify the consolidation process. The solution aims for harmonization and streamlines financial reporting with embedded analytics in the digital core. Further, the architecture diagram below represents the embedded SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting and how it integrates with other pertinent applications to serve as an integrated platform for consolidations, advanced analytics, planning, and reporting.
Figure 1 : SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting Architecture Diagram
Embedded SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting:
Facilitates corporate group reporting, global and local operational accounting, and local close. You can collect financial data via flexible uploads for non-SAP S/4HANA entities. Ensures data quality with group and local close by sharing the same master data and rules. Additionally, it is available as a cloud and on-premise solution.
SAP Analytics Cloud:
Enables Dashboards (for example, Digital Boardroom), Advanced Analytics, and Planning (top- down and bottom-up). The live data connections to SAP S/4HANA enable real-time buisness insights.
SAP Data Collection:
Is the application that connects to the S/4HANA instance where Group Reporting is enabled leveraging SAP Cloud Platform to collect Financial data from non-SAP sources, Non-financial data, and Notes.
SAP Disclosure Management:
Is the solution for managing the production, publication, and filing of regulatory disclosures, financial regulatory statements, and reports.
Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) vs. Group Reporting
SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting is an evolution from its past products for financial consolidation, such as BPC (all versions) and BPC optimized, and going forward is SAP’s strategic direction for the consolidation process. Therefore, it makes sense to be a more favorable choice when embarking on modernizing the applications portfolio. Alternatively, if the customer wants to implement a standalone, on-premise solution, BPC BW/4HANA is a viable option.
Benefits and Capabilities of Group Reporting
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- Fast Close – Close steps for currency translations and intercompany matching and reconciliation can be performed before the group reporting step, thus, reducing the overall timeline for close. Additionally, there is no delay when posting adjustments locally as they are immediately available for group reporting.
- Transparency and Auditability – SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting solution provides transparency and fully enables drill-through to the line-items of the entity for granular insights on the transaction.
- Matrix Consolidation – Provides configuration functionality for consolidation of managerial reporting dimensions, such as profit centers and business segments for inclusion in matrix consolidation. Additionally, it incorporates managerial consolidation entities in the standard consolidation process flow and allows flexible reporting across managerial unit hierarchies showing eliminations on the correct management hierarchy nodes to be able to see the changes resulting from unit restructuring or internal reorganization.
- Plan Consolidation – Ability to execute financial consolidation steps on plan data and perform actual versus plan comparison reporting. You can collect plan data from a file using the flexible upload feature of SAP S/4HANA. Additionally, by generating it from previous year’s actual data. Additionally, you can store it in predefined versions
- Predictive Consolidation – Ability to execute financial consolidation steps on the predictive financial postings from the SAP S/4HANA predictive ledger. For example, those postings derived from sales orders and be able to analyze the data in a P&L reporting format.
In Closing..
In conclusion, SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting is the future-proof capability for Financial and Managerial Consolidation. Further, the solution is an integrated platform for consolidations, advanced analytics, planning, and reporting.
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